Ryan Davis and his friends are leveraging Millennials' love of music with their desire to support great causes. The result? Plays Well With Others, a site that calls attention to bands that support great causes. According to Davis,
"We feel that there is an unprecedented desire among young people right now to change the world for the better, and may not know about all the organizations that they can join. We want to help connect those fans to the organizations and causes that bands are involved with, and help build awareness about new bands and the causes that they support."
Plays Well With Others designs and publicizes events that call attention to bands and the social causes those bands support. The next big event is Feb 13, to raise awareness about an organization called Not For Sale that fights human trafficking. Here is the result of a short interview with Ryan earlier this year:
How did you get started? Who is involved and how did you first get the idea for Plays Well With Others?
Davis: It began with a few individuals that work in the music industry seeing how many socially aware causes had a presence at shows and festivals, and wanting to find a way to extend that experience with those causes to beyond just the show. We wanted to take that interaction that the fans had with that cause and that band and extend it to their day-to-day lives. We began working on what that would mean and how it would look, and a few weeks later www.doyouplaywell.com went up. Right now we are working in all aspects, such as event production, artistic involvement, even a film team to help us build content for bands that are involved with us and to help tell the stories of the causes that we're working with.
What kind of response are you experiencing?
Davis: The response has truly been overwhelming, both from the organizational side and from the bands wanting to get involved. As soon as we've explained the concept of what we're trying to do everyone has been very eager to get involved.
How do people learn about your site?
Davis: We've been marketing through the usual avenues of Facebook and Myspace, and also reaching out through music blogs and trend websites. We want to reach young people where they are already, and that's going to be in the online music community. We have a really young group of people involved with this project, and we're working with causes and music that we genuinely believe in. I think that comes across when we're appealing to people, millennial have grown up with online marketing and can tell when something is forced. We are giving them a real and genuine way that they can get involved in areas that they care about, whether it's with the homeless, feeding the hungry, or with a group like Not For Sale.
One of your goals is to "Create an ongoing involvement with people and those bands/causes through both online marketing and real world experiences." What is your plan for getting marketers involved with Do You Play Well?
Davis: We offer a way for both bands and causes to build their communities, without asking for anything in return. Our only goal with this organization is to connect people to music and causes that they care about, in return we can give them publicity, content, and a voice to get their message out to people that might not hear it otherwise. We're talking about the generation that is more plugged in and more aware of the world around them than any before, a generation that wants to find out about ways to better the world. We want to give them all the tools that they need in order to be as effective at doing that as possible.
What's next? What plans do you have for the site?
Davis:We're currently discussing a redesign of it that would allow forums for users to connect to each other in their own communities and join their efforts on new projects, as well as building a space on the site that would allow bands to interact with people that are in the music industry and with organizations that are looking for ways to get more involved in the music community. We want the website to be really the starting point for users to begin projects that carry over into the real world. We feel that this generation can really change the world for the better, and we want to do everything that we can to help.
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