Coming Soon – YouTube Channel See Through Together – a new platform to help the climate inactive become active 

First Facebook, now YouTube. After gaining the attention of half a million people around the world on Facebook with a zero budget, See Through is targeting YouTube, the world’s #2 social media platform. Can See Through Together repeat the trick? 

Preaching, Pulpits & Platforms

• To change minds you need a voice
• There’s no point in communicating without an audience

Every preacher needs both pulpit and congregation. If you’re preaching effective climate action in the digital age, for pulpit and congregation read ‘platform’ and ‘reach’.

The good news: unlike churches, our Silicon Valley Overlords, like YouTube owner Google/Alphabet, provide platforms for free – their toll is exacted not via tithes and taxes, but via our attention and data.

The challenging news: now everyone has access to their own pulpit, drawing a crowd is tougher than ever.

To get your voice heard amid the online YouTube cacophony, it pays to understand modern technology. See Through is blessed with social media experts who have already demonstrated the value of their expertise in the world’s biggest social media platform, Facebook.

In three years, their deep understanding of Facebook’s algorithms, business model, and the behavioural psychology of the way 3 billion of the world’s 8.5 billion people use it every month, together with the volunteer moderators who enable STN to scale this, have proved there’s still low-hanging fruit available, if you know where to look. 

The same team is now turning their attention to YouTube.

The Benefits of Scale

Unlike mediaeval churches, successful movements in the digital age can measure impact within months, not decades, and spread globally in years, not centuries.

As of mid-2024, See Through News has a reach of nearly half a million, largely via Facebook, and is on track to hit seven figures by 2025.

Before explaining in more detail how See Through Together is aiming to replicate this reach on YouTube, it’s worth examining why it matters.

After all, amassing engaged audiences is exactly the game social media giants like YouTube want us to play. Most of us are now aware of how they trade our data for money, but how climate activists like See Through can trade the same engagement to measurably reduce carbon is less obvious.

Most of the articles on the See Through News website explain this methodology in one form or other, but here’s a brief summary of the main benefits of a greater digital reach in See Through’s Goal of Speeding Up Carbon Drawdown by Helping the Inactive Become Active:

Numbers game

The more zeros on your audience figures, the better your odds of moving a percentage of them from climate inaction into climate action. Social media engagement data means STN not only put a precise number on this numbers game, but identity any weak links in the chain, and A/B test to strengthen them. It has already started experimenting with this process.

Target audience

A key element of See Through’s definition of effective vs ineffective climate action, is the importance of preaching to the unconverted, rather than to the choir (fellow travellers who already agree with you) or the apostates (climate deniers who will never agree with you). Mass-appeal projects like STN Facebook global network of community groups reach ordinary people, Category 3 in See Through’s 4-category taxonomy, defined as those who ‘accept the science and reality of human-induced climate change, but who feel powerless to do anything about it’. In other words, almost everyone.

SME Leverage

The main function of STN’s community Notice Board Facebook Groups is to connect local businesses and local customers. By offering free advertising to local Small and Medium Enterprises, this creates a dependency which grows with the reach of the group in the community. With several groups with memberships of over 50% of the local population, and one that exceeds 100%, this is a valuable asset. Instead of monetising it, STN is leveraging this dependency to incentivize local businesses to measurably reduce carbon via sibling programme See Through Carbon’s Pilot 1.

Freedom of movement

The fact that See Through News has achieved this reach with no bank account, so far, is significant in more ways than one.

Not only have digital street smarts saved the expense of buying reach by paying our Silicon Valley Overlords hard cash (See Through News’s budget to date for its global reach is (including tax) $0.00).

Not having to ‘boost’ posts has also meant a huge boost in productivity and efficiency.

The full breadth and depth of See Through’s talent pool is deployed, maximising each contributor’s superpowers to create a joined-up strategy to deliver metric tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent reduced or sequestered, or CO2e.

Many organisations, including climate activist ones, are strong in social media/SEO, digital branding, carbon accounting and storytelling. See Through’s global network of pro bono experts covers all of these bases, but with the added advantage of being motivated by a common purpose, and buying into the same zero-budget methodology.

They all buy into the See Through Goal of measurable carbon reduction, but also into reducing carbon for its own reward, rather than being paid. Measuring output in the same units as climate scientists (CO2e) rather than money not only motivates expert volunteers to donate their expertise and time to See Through projects, but frees them to spend their time effectively. 

As any successful YouTube influencer knows, success comes at a high price. Stop feeding new content into YouTube’s insatiable maw, and the YouTube algorithm beast will soon neglect you and move on to the next fresh meat.

See Through’s team of creatives have a goal that transcends YouTube’s engagement metrics and opaque financial reward tariff. Working with like-minded colleagues, they’re motivated by a common goal of addressing the biggest existential crisis in human history is reward enough. 

Even better, they can work their magic liberated from all the downsides of operating with a bank account: fundraising, budget battles, contract negotiations, IP haggling etc.

It’s the Stories, Stupid

Understanding the medium is important, but so is the message. 

In this sense, nothing has changed when it comes to moving people from inaction to action. The answer in today’s age of platforms and reach is the same as it’s always been in the age of pulpits and congregations.

Better storytelling.

After working the social media eyeball seams, and labouring in the podcast earhole mines, See Through’s global team of creatives, filmmakers, content providers, musicians, animators and artists are building up quite a pipeline of content with which to launch this YouTube effort in the second half of 2024.

Here’s a taster list:

• Betting The Farm, an original reality TV format that eavesdrops on multi-generational farming families around the world as they learn of their farm’s carbon footprints, and decide whether they can, or will, do anything to reduce them. 
• Old and new series of See Through’s two podcasts, The Truth Lies In Bedtime Stories (entirely true, largely) and The See Through News Podcast (entirely true, full stop).
• A year in the life of Britain’s most influential woodsman, Ben Law, as seen through his two apprentices he selects in autumn, to experience a year learning how to make a living as a sustainable woodsman in the 21st century. Includes a blockbuster final episode, now in development…
• Original music, performed exclusively by world-renowned artists, for See Through News in the Concert In The Key of C series of live events.
• Exclusive, unseen footage, showing unlikely alliances between unlikely allies, motivated by a common passion, like two 4-string maestri, separated by continents, culture and language.

Versions of some of these videos have been seen as sneak peeks, or beta versions, by subscribers to the (free) See Through News newsletter. 

Some are re-packaged versions of non-SEO-optimised content languishing in the See Through News YouTube channel vaults. 

Some have never been seen by anyone before.

There’s plenty more: shareable fun stuff, extraordinary archive, fresh material from new voices.

Not all of them will have an obvious link to carbon drawdown, but that will be no surprise to anyone familiar with the See Through methodology.

Of course, See Through Together will also cater for those with a more direct interest in clearly-labelled carbon and climate-related material. There will also be video material from See Through’s wide range of projects, including:

• 2-minute videos made by novice 10-15-year old students in a Nairobi slum school on their ideas to promote Sustainable Development Goals locally, made under the remote mentorship of See Through’s Global Reporter Intensive Training (GRIT) scheme
• Original films about local volunteers made for the 1 Sunday Morning, 4 Films project, a ‘unique experiment in community filmmaking’.
• Asking old people How To Live Without Plastic.
• Exposing media manipulation for the Vox Pox Project
• Award-winning See Through Education documentaries on the benefits of giving children real responsibility

and much more…

How you can help

The See Through Together team is finalising the last pre-launch branding details for this new YouTube extension of the See Through mission.

The See Through Together YouTube channel is set up, and ready to receive the pipeline of material being amassed by See Through’s creative team

If you’re curious to find out how this new YouTube adventure works out, and how it connects with all the other See Through projects and programmes to measurably reduce carbon, you know what do.

Like. Subscribe. Recommend.

At least you know See Through will never ask you for money, only try to nudge you into effective climate action…