Four entrepreneurs had a desire to start a cause-based business, but ran into trouble. The trouble they ran into wasn't a bad thing -- the ideas they kept coming up with turned out to be taken, and the people who came to the ideas first were doing fantastic jobs.
The Elemental Project was born out of that realization. As Director of Business Development Brian Dokter says, "Why reinvent the wheel? Within our own resources, we wanted to find a way we could support businesses and people and organizations already doing positive, cause-based things."
The Elemental team, also including Jonathan Williams, writer/editor, Director of Sales and Marketing Timm Bloem and Creative Director Travis Fahlen, works to create a platform through which they can tell the stories of amazing people doing amazing things.
"Polarizing issues -- religion, politics -- didn't matter (to us)," Dokter says. "We wanted to expose people and businesses and non-profits that are doing these positive things and we want to provide platforms for the general public to either support these causes or find resources within their own lives to achieve their dreams."
The Elemental Project began as a website, where they hosted the stories they culled. They found local non-profits and causes that had no budget or staff for exposure or marketing and worked to surface these organizations' efforts. The Elemental homepage states, "In a world obsessed with negative news, Elemental is here to expose the other side of the story."
"We're trying to take the focus off news that is fear and disaster, and change it to how people are fixing the problems and how we can (also) help fix them," Williams says.
Williams spent a year actively reading the news, finding headlines to be full of "doom and gloom," but also found that when you start learning about the positive stories, you find a universal truth.
"When you start helping people, you're also helping yourself," he says. "You're finding a great level of peace in the knowledge that you're using your skills to help someone else have clean water."
Such is the case with
Unto Inc., an organization working to ensure clean water to the people of the Dominican.
"What we did for them was develop a website with a donation program," Dokter says.
With heightened exposure and public awareness, Unto Inc. was able to produce 100,000 bottles of water a week, Dokter says, and drive it directly to Port-au-Prince, Haiti, the site of the devastating 2010 earthquake.
"That was a success in terms of implementing marketing, but it was a bigger success in terms of raising awareness for a local group doing something positive that local people could support," Dokter says.
Considering the current technology in the world of flash, iPads, blogging, smart phones and social media, the Elemental Project will soon become a digital magazine. It was Elemental's work, along with social media, that drew attention from
The Common, a website where users create personal profiles to match their talents with the needs in their communities.
"Basically, everyday (Common users) get maybe 15 new, potential opportunities to help someone out," Bloem says. "What (the Common) realized they were having some struggles with were stories about the success. They were interested in hearing that we were interested in promoting with a digital magazine, and we're very excited to tell their stories through us."
Common Co-Founder Benjamin Gott expresses this excitement, saying,
"We're in a pretty fantastic time right now where the young entrepreneurial community is excited both about new ideas and businesses, as they always have been, but also with the idea of truly creating projects that better the world. You can call them social justice projects, socially conscious projects, etc., but the bottom-line is that there has been a shift in the past 3-4 years towards things that are 'good.'"
He adds, "What the guys at Elemental are doing is shaping up to be one of my favorites -- and for a very specific reason. I remember them explaining to me the genesis of what Elemental is and why they came up with it: they want to promote the others that are in the space of projects that create good. Simple, somewhat selfless, you could say, and really needed. I love the idea that they might aggregate, organize, highlight, and educate the public on projects that need to be known about."
Elemental's logo contains nine boxes, and each box correlates to an individual need: water, health, food, prosperity, environment, clothing, housing, freedom, interpersonal and multifaceted needs. There are stories for each category. For each community, Elemental will publish a specific digital magazine, helping partners reach their communities. Communities can be location or organization-based -- wherever positive things are happening. Whether this exposure inspires someone to support an existing cause or develop their own is up to the individual reader, but the more it happens, the more good it does as users find that "universal truth."
In January, the Elemental Project plans to have a flash version of community-specific magazines, accessible through the Elemental Project that The Common can send to their 30,000 members. The magazine will be available in Tablet form, and on other interactive platforms. Funding occurs in the form of advertising and community sponsorship at the starting point of the community being initiated. The number and variety of communities is essentially limitless.
"We aren't just a group of four guys with our heads in the clouds," Bloem says. "We are specifically connecting ourselves with people taking positive steps against tragedies."
Photos:Jonathan Williams, Travis Fahlen, Timm Bloem, and Brian Dokter
Timm Bloem
Travis Fahlen
Jonathan Williams
Brian Dokter
Photographs by
Brian Kelly -All Rights Reserved