Progressive Source Communications was started in 2007 to serve the growing digital marketing needs of non-profit and progressive organizations. Our staff is experienced in new media, journalism and public interest advocacy. This experience gives us useful insight into how organizations can use the new media most effectively and communicate their messages directly to the public.  

Progressive Source has worked with non-profit organizations in the areas of civil and human rights, environmental and community advocacy, and healthcare. We have produced web videos, developed strategies for websites and marketing campaigns, and assisted with strategic messaging and branding.  

The case studies at left provide examples of our work in digital marketing.

The Legacy Challenge is a unique campaign by the Planned Giving Department of The American Civil Liberties Union. This enormously successful “challenge grant” program, funded by the Robert W. Wilson Charitable Trust, is among the most successful campaigns of its kind. Donors who bequeath money to the ACLU Foundation have 10% of the estimated value of their estate provided as an additional cash gift to the ACLU immediately.

To help market “The Legacy Challenge” to its hundreds of thousands of members and 50 state chapters, the ACLU turned to Progressive Source Communications to create a Web video series called. “In Their Own Words.”

In these two- to three-minute videos, which contain the actual words of donors to the Legacy Challenge, viewers are able to walk through the experience of different types of donors to the ACLU, as they express why they are participating in the “Legacy Challenge.”

The first video, "One Donor's Story" can be viewed on the ACLU website. Another video is expected to be completed before tax time.

For the first video, Progressive Source worked closely with the Planned Giving Department at the ACLU, which selected the subject for the video and joined us in interviewing pre-interviewing the subject, then interviewing him at his home near Washington D.C. Progressive Source managed the camera, audio and music work, as well as the video editing and creation of graphics for the video.

In late 2007, the non-profit Virgin Unite engaged Progressive Source to assist "The Elders" - an internationally renowned group of retired leaders. Our task was to help build out the online component of their “Every Human Has Rights” Campaign. The campaign helps to draw attention to the 60th Anniversary of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. The Elders' ranks include Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, former President Jimmy Carter, and Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland and former head of the U.N. High Commission for Human Rights.

Organizational participants in the year-long campaign, which launched on December 10, 2007 at http://www.everyhumanhasrights.org/, include Realizing Rights, WITNESS, Google Earth, Amnesty International and UNICEF.

Progressive Source developed a strategic plan for the website and its partners, helped supervise the campaign website buildout, and created content and a content template for the historic Google Earth Every Human Has Rights layer that will launch this spring. (An early version of it in Google maps can be seen on the Elders website at http://www.everyhumanhasrights.org/speak_out.)

Progressive Source also created an Every Human Has Rights Campaign on Peter Gabriel’s WITNESS Hub website, at http://hub.witness.org/en/TellYourStory

as well as a web video of Mary Robinson that appears on that site at http://hub.witness.org/en/MaryRobinson.

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.

For more than a decade, Physicians for a National Health Program has fought an uphill battle to raise public awareness about the benefits of a national health insurance program. The release of Michael Moore’s documentary, “Sicko,” coupled with the 2008 presidential race, encouraged the New York Chapter of Physicians for a National Health Program to hire Progressive Source to create an edgy three-minute Web video entitled, “Where Is My National Health Insurance Card?”

The footnoted Web video can be found on the microsite that Progressive Source created to house and serve it, at www.whereismyhealthcard.com.

A Web-based marketing effort focused on non-members of the PNHP organization is expected to launch the campaign during the next few months.

Progressive Source created the website, and scripted a highly effective Web advocacy video for the Open Washington Square Park Coalition, a grassroots community group dedicated to maintaining the open spirit of Greenwich Village’s historic park. Using documentary footage to expose the New York City Park Department’s misrepresentation of its plans, Progressive Source created and promoted "The Truth About Washington Square Park."

Progressive Source marketed the video with local newspaper ads and a Facebook campaign targeted to NYU students. Soon 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.”

Strongly worded editorials opposing the plan appeared in both the NYU student newspaper, and the award winning community paper The Villager. More than 300 NYU students joined a Progressive Source-created Facebook group supporting the Open Washington Square Park Coalition. Within months, the Community Board overseeing the park rescinded its earlier approval of the plan by a vote of 40 to 5.

While Vice President helping manage the New York office of Fenton Communications, Progressive Source’s CEO Jonathan Greenberg managed the marketing campaign for the Save Darfur Rallies in Washington D.C. and in New York’s Central Park. On behalf of the American Jewish World Service, a founding Save Darfur Coalition member, Greenberg created and placed a major paid newspaper, radio and Web campaign to turn out tens of thousands of people. Greenberg also created a small “day of” the rally flyer and supervised a team of 15 workers who crossed the park publicizing the event. The New York rally drew more than 30,000 people and made the front page of the New York Times.

The week after the Central Park rally, 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.

In 1995, Progressive Source CEO Jonathan Greenberg founded Gist Communications, one of Silicon Alley’s earliest and most widely-distributed Internet content companies. With Progressive Source Vice President Cheryl Everette as Editorial Director, Greenberg turned Gist into an international content and software applications company whose innovations and Webby Award-winning website, gist.com outpaced TV Guide Online to build the largest audience for interactive TV-related content in the world. Gist.com’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 had more than 4 million registered users, and ran websites in the US, France and Germany.

Gist.com was the first site to enable Internet users to customize TV listings for all 11,000 systems across the US and was the first to send email subscriptions containing personalized listings. The site was also the first to deploy customized TV listings in Europe.

Gist Communications built the web’s first interactive Fan Club sites for 25 of America’s top television shows. Each Fan Club site had episode guides, quizzes, polls and photo galleries.

Gist Communications created some of the Internet’s earliest web video programs and interactive web video rating guides. 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, the first onscreen entertainment magazine, for the Echostar satellite television service, which reached 7 million U.S. households.