27 January 2009 Today we have Graham Wallington as a guest. He is the successful initiator of the two projects that made it to the second and the third rank in the Amazee bucket. Click “Read more” for a full interview.
The money from both winning projects will go to “Water for Dixie“. The project’s goal is to bring running water to all the houses in the town of Dixie.

Mathias: How did you mobilize so many people? What did you do to market your projects?

Graham: The WEangels are a group of dedicated WildEarth.TV viewers who did all the hard work. They created a group and a cause on Facebook, they invited all their friends to join our projects at Amazee. They wrote blogs, mailed their address books and took it in turns making sure that any new project members had an avatar an joined our other projects. Also, WE have a team of Twitterers called the WEtwits who monitor our @wildearth Twitter account almost 24/7, and they made sure that as many of our followers on Twitter joined as possible. Finally, the www.member4.mystagingwebsite.com website and the official WildEarth social network http://wildearth.ning.com are moderated and administered by the WEadmin team, and they worked very hard to convert as many of our dedicated viewers into Amazee members and then encouraged them to join our projects and upload an avatar.

How are people responding to your projects?
Our projects are about helping a small village of poor people who live on the outskirts of a very large conservation area. Helping these people is not just about to the right thing for our fellow man, but also the only way to conserve our wilderness areas. You see, the communities that live in and around natural areas need to experience direct tangible benefits of conserving nature or they will be tempted to destroy the wildlife through desperation. So when WE help the village of Dixie, WE also help nature. I think that our audience respond very well to this approach, and appreciate our open, caring and holistic aspect of the WildEarth.TV brand.

What else do you need besides money for the Water for Dixie projects? What can people do to help except to donate?
There are many things that WE will need to achieve our objectives beyond money. Things like labor expertise and transport will have to be sourced in South Africa, but our international WEangels can help us by getting as much exposure for this project as possible. So telling your local radio stations (WE are happy to do LIVE telephone interviews at any time of the day or night), getting your local TV stations involved, encouraging press journalists to write articles, or any other exposure that you can think of. WE have seen how effective radio interviews can be and already there are folk working on a small TV insert in Denver, Colorado.

What are you exactly going to do with the money?
WE are still costing the project of getting water to about 87 houses, but WE estimate it will cost about $25,000. WE have already raised about $2,000 plus the $5,000 from Amazee, all of which will go towards: pipes, pumps, drilling a borehole, storage tanks, stand pipes, taps, tools, fuel, transport and labor. When WE actually begin laying pipe, WE will have to move very quickly so as not to be stopped by various groupings of people who sadly do not want to see these poor people uplifted as they fear that they will loose their power over them. So WE will purchase everything and store it at Djuma and then when we start, aim to finish in short order.

Where can Amazee users follow the development of the Water for Dixie project?
Amazee users will be able to follow the development on the “Water for Dixie” project on Amazee, at our website www.member4.mystagingwebsite.com, on our Blog http://blog.member4.mystagingwebsite.com and on our social network http://wildearth.ning.com.

Graham Wallington was interviewed by Mathias Möller.
(This interview was ‘borrowed’ from www.amazee.com … you can see it here: http://www.amazee.com/interview-graham)