Want To Reduce Carbon With Sophisticated Storytelling?

Volunteer opportunities with See Through’s projects to measurably reduce carbon offer meaningful work plus invaluable experience

How climate activists interested in speeding up carbon drawdown can support various See Through projects designed to help the Inactive become Active .

The See Through Goal

See Through News was established in 2021, using cunning storytelling tricks to bring a pragmatic rigour to climate activism.

See Through’s methodology is complex, reflecting human complexity. Essentially, it applies deft storytelling to the delivery of scientific fact, with the object of moving ‘Unwilling Inactivists’ towards measurable carbon reduction.

This combination of subtle nudging and blunt science is reflected in its Goal:

Speeding Up Carbon Drawdown by Helping the Inactive Become Active.

See Through News has created a global network of experts, combining their experience in a wide range of fields. These include disciplines as diverse as social media, IT, AI, filmmaking, music, carbon accounting, project management, data science and podcasting.

See Through’s experts, all work pro bono on a budget of zero, donating their talent and time to remarkable effect. Largely by exploiting undiscovered possibilities on the world’s biggest social media platform, Facebook, See Through News exploits this free infrastructure to target large numbers of ordinary people.

By mid-2024, STN’s total global reach had passed half a million, and is still growing at 10%+ per month.

Exclusive access to a large audience of ordinary people, via social media platforms as well as its own websites, is a key component of See Through’s ‘Content to CO2’ (‘C2C’) methodology.

The larger the starting audience, the greater the number of people its storytelling methodology can nudge towards effective climate activism, measured in metric tonnes of carbon dioxide reduced or sequestered (CO2e).

Brand Extension

The same methodology has since been applied to other See Through programmes:

2022: The Truth Lies in Bedtime Stories, from See Through News Podcast series, later joined by its See Through News Podcast stablemate.

2023: See Through Carbon, a free-to-use carbon calculation, auditing and consultancy service, currently running seven Pilots.

2024: See Through Together, a new YouTube channel launching Q3 2024, designed to attract a broad range of Unwilling Inactivists with unique, original, exclusive video content featuring everything from unconventional musical concerts to woodland craft, Dad jokes, and documentaries about children being given real responsibility.

2025: See Through Games, making online versions of a suite of games (The Think Game, The Learn Game and The Act Game), the real-world versions of which have proven to guide ordinary people from carbon inactivity to carbon activity.

Each expansion requires a new set of experts to create and develop these new projects, and more volunteers to administer and maintain them.

See Through Money

See Through’s projects have so far succeeded without paying anyone anything. It doesn’t even need a bank account.

The only hard costs incurred so far have been website hosting, donated by supporters.

See Through operates via a transaction system much older than money, bartering, Bartering is something we all still do every day at home and in personal relationships, but have largely abandoned at the workplace. See Through has developed many different ways for individuals, companies and organisations to contribute without the mediation of money.

See Through is composed of volunteers who value this approach. Many have worked with charities or NGOs, where they’ve found the amount of time, effort and headspace devoted to fundraising, accounting and auditing to be demoralisingly large, and the amount of time left over to act in pursuit of the organisation’s purpose disappointingly small.

Working 100% with volunteers, without even any administrative overhead, means any time devoted to a See Through project is spent advancing it, rather than working out how to pay for it.

Whenever money appears to be required, See Through has so far found that in fact all that’s required is the right volunteer to join the network and contribute their experience, effort and enthusiasm pro bono.

See Through Volunteering

Far from deterring volunteers, See Through’s 100% pro bono approach has proved to be a refreshing incentive, and proof of integrity, for volunteers who ‘buy into’ its ‘unique selling point’. Even if explaining how to operate without money requires using words like ‘buy’ and ‘sell’, See Through has proved money is not necessary to measurably reduce carbon.

It’s true that See Through has received in-kind donations of goods and services, most notably a voucher for half a million dollars-worth of supercomputer grade cloud computing.

Even donations as generous as this can only be effectively used to reduce carbon with the addition of a team of volunteers donating their time. In the case of the supercomputing donation, the team that created and ran the See Through Carbon Competition, dedicated to promoting carbon reduction in the Global South.

One consequence of not involving money is much greater efficiency – and far more fun. By not spending any time or effort on fundraising, pitching, grant applications, contract negotiations, auditing, financial reporting and tax returns, working on See Through Projects avoids most of the tedious frustrations that can rapidly diminish volunteering enthusiasm for organisations that require money.

The See Through project depends on a network of committed climate activists who want their efforts to be measured in the same unit used by climate scientists, metric tonnes of CO2e.

What kind of volunteers is See Through looking for?

Here are some broad descriptions of volunteering opportunities. If you’d like to know more, or know anyone who might be interested, please email:

volunteer@seethroughnews.org

With a short outline of your experience, skills and motivation, mentioning any particularly appealing See Through projects.

See Through News in 100 words

See Through News are climate activists with the Goal of ‘Speeding Up Carbon Drawdown by Helping the Inactive Become Active’.

Our work combines sophisticated storytelling and hard science to leverage the free infrastructure provided by social media to measurably reduce carbon.

Our global network of experts works pro bono, offering exceptional mentoring opportunities by experienced experts in a broad range of fields, including social media, marketing, filmmaking, music, content creation, carbon accounting, climate activism, journalism, IT, graphic design, SEO and AI.

We measure success using the same unit as climate scientists – tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent reduced or sequestered (CO2e).

Volunteering Opportunities

In no particular order, here are four broad areas in which See Through has volunteering opportunities.

We have an existing network of experts contributing their expertise, but See Through’s rapid growth means we need more people, to support, maintain and advance various projects.

See Through welcomes both veterans who bring their own experience and skill sets, and enthusiastic beginners who seek real-world experience and top-quality mentoring.

Administrators

Are you a well-organised, methodical person with the energy and time to help run projects designed to measurably reduce carbon?

See Through needs experienced veterans, and can also train and mentor enthusiastic beginners, to help administer a variety of carbon-reducing projects, including:

See Through Carbon: overseeing, coordinating and smoothly administering one or more of seven pilots road-testing a new, free-to-use, carbon calculation, auditing and consultancy services aimed at small and medium businesses who usually lack the funds to access such services. This involves clear communication with both pilot participants ranging from family farms to music venues, local small businesses and care homes, and See Through’s global team of pro bono carbon accounting experts.

See Through News: See Through News administers a global network of around 5,000 Facebook Groups, most of which are active, hundreds are growing rapidly, and dozens already have memberships of 10%+ of the total local population (current record is a South African group with a membership 125% the size of its population!). Roles can include moderating specific geographic or topic-based groups, and/or supporting the network of local moderators running the larger groups day-to-day. You don’t have to be a Facebook expert to take on these roles, but you soon will be.

See Through Group: As See Through’s programmes grow in size and number, they require coordinators to facilitate communication amongst its global network of experts, advisors, and consultants. An experienced PA, project manager or administrator would be ideal for this role.

Social Media Managers

See Through flourishes by leveraging the free infrastructure provided by social media giants like Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram and TikTok.

See Through News has a remarkable track record in exploiting Facebook in innovative, original ways to create a large audience of ‘ordinary’ people it can exclusively access to nudge towards measurable climate action. See Through Together is now targeting the world’s #2 platform, YouTube, and will then move on to develop bespoke strategies to best use each platform to most effectively speed up carbon drawdown. The social media team requires experienced, or enthusiastic volunteers in various roles, principally:

See Through News: creating, executing and co-ordinating See Through’s social media strategies across its own websites and social media platforms, analysing data, A/B testing the effectiveness of different approaches.

See Through Together: YouTube SEO experts and data analysts. Data analysis using YouTube and 3rd-party tools, A/B testing, SEO for thumbnail design and text descriptions.

Content Creators

Are you an experienced filmmaker, journalist, writer, podcaster, artist, animator, graphic designer or musician with time to spare to measurably reduce carbon?

Or are you a student, beginner, or amateur, aspiring to improve your skills in any of these areas and be mentored by experts, on projects that measurably reduce carbon?

Either way, See Through has a wide variety of volunteering opportunities over our key platforms:

See Through News: articles, analysis, shareable text content for target audiences ranging from ordinary unwilling inactivists to climate action experts. Text for each level is written in a style corresponding to the target sector, involving command of varying registers, tones, and writing styles.

See Through Together: creating, producing and editing video content for a YouTube channel designed to attract the attention – by any means possible – of a wide range of demographics, in order to nudge as many of them as possible along a path that leads to measurable carbon reduction.

See Through Games: coders, data visualisers, graphic designers, sound designers, social media SEO specialists, to make online versions of proven real-world games that use subtle behavioural psychology to nudge ordinary people from shoulder-shrugging climate inaction to positive carbon-reducing action.

Software Engineers/IT Experts

All See Through projects involve some degree of IT. This can be as simple as compiling a variety of social media platform data onto a Google spreadsheet, more complex website design and management, or in some cases cutting-edge AI, complex database design and project managing the contributions of volunteers to ensure they can be integrated and maintained.

Here are some of the current major projects requiring more IT/software support:

See Through News/See Through Carbon websites: Both websites have a large backlog of work, as the projects progress far out-runs the sites ability to describe and explain it. STN has a large inventory of underutilised content on a WordPress platform that requires migration to a different service provider and CMS (Craft) where it can be deployed to better effect. STC is already on Craft, with a more robust underlying structure, but a big backlog of content to be added once the design has been augmented.

See Through Carbon: The pilot phase of this ambitious AFOT (Accurate, Free to use, Open Source, Transparent) carbon calculator, auditor and consultant for small and medium-sized companies is providing detailed feedback. This data needs to be translated into the design and build of a database that can manage large-scale data, and an API to automate data collection and processing. This long-term work starts with an Entity Relationship Model, and a Data Flow Chart, and must encompass the database’s potential to act as a consistently-tagged and taxonomised AI training dataset. In term of UX, it requires reliable, accessible, compelling public-facing data visualisations, and accessible, responsive apps that work smoothly on multiple devices.

See Through Games: Designing, coding and integrating the development of a suite of three online video games, and linking them to a database that in turn links to other See Through projects. Skills required range from coding to animation, look-and-feel, music composition and sound design.

Whether you’re just starting out, and looking for experience and mentoring, or retired and looking to put your skills to good use, or somewhere in between and motivated by effective climate action, See Through has a niche for you.

To join See Through team of content creators, social media marketers, graphic designers, project mangers, administrators and software engineers, email: