This technology affects humans, what to know in 2020

Tech updates like “Meat Made Out of Air”, “DNA Warrants” and Other Things

Meat Made Out of Air, DNA Warrants and Other Things 

Regular

The Addams Family - Moonbathing

Friday, September 18, 1964. “The Addams Family” makes its debut on network television.

Unapologetically Addams

Condensed

IKEA. It’s infamous here in Houston for long lines, impossible parking, labyrinth-like store layouts, painfully vague instruction booklets and questionable (yet delicious) meatballs. 

Here for the Hygge

When I was visiting The Museum of Fine Arts’ Shooting the Moon: Photographs from the Museum’s Collection 50 years After Apollo 11 this past weekend, I found a small art depiction of a native tribe gathering around outside during an eclipse and supposedly making noise.

Share One, Share All.

When I was visiting The Museum of Fine Arts’ Shooting the Moon: Photographs from the Museum’s Collection 50 years After Apollo 11 this past weekend, I found a small art depiction of a native tribe gathering around outside during an eclipse and supposedly making noise. The exhibit label explained that they believed there was a giant animal in the sky trying to eat the sun—therefore everyone had to go outside and make noise to scare the animal away.

Semi-Condensed

We believe in the power of great design to build creative concepts that push nonprofit communities to the brink of action.

How to use design to activate people for good

For years I’ve been designing logos, brands, and engagement campaigns for a brand strategy and creative agency called Black Sheep. We’re called Black Sheep for all the reasons you might guess: We do things differently. We’re ahead of the curve. We break the rules. Blah, blah, blah, insert predictable design agency phrase here. 

Donating Your Work: Don’t Get Taken for a Ride

Raise your hand if you’ve ever been hit up for free (or deeply discounted) work.

Keep your hand up if you said yes to doing the free (or deeply discounted) work because it was “for a good cause.”

Drop that hand onto your face if you ended up hating everything about the experience of the free (or deeply discounted) work you ended up doing. That’s a facepalm, and it’s the correct response to a whole lot of the donated work designers and marketers end up doing.

Well-behaved is overrated: The silences and gaps that make history

“Well-behaved women seldom make history” — an oft-repeated quote with a surprising history itself.

“Well-behaved women seldom make history” — an oft-repeated quote with a surprising history itself.

Accessibility and Aggression: The Weirdly Harmonic Rules of Krav Maga

I’ve been taking lessons in Krav Maga (Hebrew for “contact combat”) for about eight months now.

Happy National Book Lovers Day. From, The Flock.

Today, The Flock is celebrating National Book Lovers Day.

I had a hard time coming up with something motivational to say on a Monday. I was in charge of finding and posting motivation Monday quotes for social media at a previous job.

Moments Worth Recognition

I had a hard time coming up with something motivational to say on a Monday. I was in charge of finding and posting motivation Monday quotes for social media at a previous job. Every Monday I would wake up thinking, “Shit–what’s a motivational quote I can post that has less than 10 words?” And this morning was, “Shit–what’s a motivational thing I can talk about thats more than ten words?”

At Black Sheep, activating people around things that matter looks different every day.

Make America Dinner Again

At Black Sheep, activating people around things that matter looks different every day. Sometimes we’re rallying big crowds for an event. Sometimes we’re championing our clients’ causes by counting impressions and reach. Lately, we’re sitting down for dinner with a few strangers in our space to talk politics.

If the idea of inviting a bunch of people you don’t know to dinner and immediately bringing up the last election sounds like a twisted nightmare to you, there are a couple of ladies you should meet.

In 2017, following a heated presidential election (you know the one), two women created Make America Dinner Again (MADA), exploring the idea that dinner and thoughtful conversation could bring people together… again.

It’s easy to feel like you don’t belong or like you weren’t meant to be here – as an artist or a creative, as an activist or even just as a person (you’re always welcomed here).

Originality is dead. Let’s steal.

It’s easy to feel like you don’t belong or like you weren’t meant to be here – as an artist or a creative, as an activist or even just as a person (you’re always welcomed here). A lot of the time, we feel like phonies, as Holden Caulfield would say.

When play gets serious and science gets seriously fun

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

Embrace the serious science of play to re-connect to the brain boosting power of fun. Your inner child and future self will thank you.

Why are we changing maps?  (from The West Wing)

Last weekend, under a threat from ICE officials of upcoming raids, I gathered with hundreds of other activists to protest the following: immigration detention facilities, separation of families at the border, treatment of asylum seekers at the border, unsafe and inhumane conditions at the facilities at the border and the aforementioned ICE raids.

The World Wasn’t Made with Borders.

Empowerment + Time = Change

Recently, I heard a story of an airport security guard named LaDonna who effectively changed the entire work culture of the airport. I think the reason this story spoke to me, is that contrast to the typical “American Dream” stories we hear, this isn’t a story about a woman who worked her way from the ground up–well, it is, but that’s not the point–it’s a story about one person changing a larger problem through smaller actions.

Compressed

Every day feels so overwhelming. To start, there’s just life.

A Book Report: Everybody Always

3 steps to turn everyday get-togethers into transformative gatherings | Priya Parker

Planning a good party or experience can feel really overwhelming.

More than a Party, for Party’s Sake

Planning a good party or experience can feel really overwhelming. 

I’m riding through the scorching pavements of Louisiana.

Can I Hold the Mic?

I’m riding through the scorching pavements of Louisiana. It’s 2 p.m. I passionately, emotionally and thuggishly listen to Solange as she philosophically elaborates:

“I can’t be a singular expression of myself–there’s too many parts, too many spaces, too many manifestations, too many lines, too many curves, too many troubles, too many journeys, too many mountains, too many rivers, so many.”

I correlate this 5-hour journey with a personal, vulnerable journey. I patiently waited for my touchdown in Houston–directly alluding to my patience during moments where the heavy weight of the world seems to be a strain on my serotonin levels.

Texas Children's Hospital performs Rachel Platten's "Fight Song"

There have been enough think pieces published to know we exist in an attention economy.

This is My Fight Song

There have been enough think pieces published to know we exist in an attention economy. Every one and every thing is fighting for our eyeballs and brain power. And it is EXHAUSTING to try to consume and manage all of the content being pulsed out by the media, brands and the digital social connections in one’s universe. 

40,000 People Need Us To Think Differently About Gun Violence

Gun violence. “We need to turn this over to science and take it away from politics.”

For years, the advice to every nonprofit was some version of "be more like a brand." Post more. Sound more polished. Chase the same tricks beverage and mattress companies use to win attention. But that advice is going out of date fast. 

Here's the good news buried in the shift: being human, being rooted in a real community, telling the truth about the work you do - these used to just be things nonprofits talked about. Now they're becoming part of how the algorithm decides who gets seen.

Let’s be real, the social media feed you're posting into isn't the feed you learned on. There are three changes to pay attention to here:

You are no longer broadcasting to your followers. You're being matched to people by interest, whether they follow you or not. According to Meta, only 17% of time on Facebook and 7% on Instagram goes to content from friends and family. The rest is strangers' content, served by an algorithm reading for interest, not relationship. This means that follower count matters less than it used to; what your organization is actually about matters way more.

For a decade, the game was capturing eyeballs at any cost, but that game is almost out of runway. This new reality rewards the meaning people seek out, instead of the noise people scroll past. A nonprofit was never going to out-shout a beverage brand for attention, and it doesn't have to start now.

Bots now account for more than half of all web traffic, the first time automated activity has outpaced human activity online. Add the flood of low-effort AI content built to trigger a reaction, and feeds get louder, faker, and angrier by the month. Outrage travels, so platforms keep rewarding it, regardless of whether it's true.

Platforms are starting to notice the same AI slop we are, and they're building against it. As feeds fill with machine-made content, audiences and the platforms chasing those audiences are turning toward visible effort, texture and even imperfection. 

Authenticity is starting to get measured less as a brand value and more as "proof of process": can people actually see the work behind the thing? Instagram has begun actively suppressing reposted and aggregated content for exactly this reason. Original, human, made-for-the-platform work is now structurally advantaged, not just ethically preferable.

The appetite for this is showing up in surprising places too. Myspace's owners are reportedly plotting a relaunch, betting that algorithm fatigue is real enough that people will pay attention to a platform explicitly selling itself as an escape from optimized feeds.

Brands without a real story are feeling the squeeze from the other direction. Even insurance companies and mattress brands, categories built on being interchangeable, are now scrambling to act like media companies just to stay visible, hiring writers and building personalities where there used to be none. But your nonprofit isn't scrambling for any of that. The real stories, real people and real process you already have aren't a compliance requirement anymore. They're the raw material every faceless brand is spending real money trying to fake.

You're the expert. Make sure AI knows it.

The same shift is happening in search. More than half of Google queries now return an AI-generated answer before a person ever clicks a website. Being the credible, well-documented source those answers get built from is starting to matter as much as being the thing someone finds by scrolling. Same principle, different doorway: substance and legitimacy are becoming the input, not just the output.

No one knows your mission, your people, and your work better than you do. When someone asks an AI assistant how to get involved in your cause, that answer should be built from what you've actually published, not a stranger's guess or a five-year-old blog post. Making sure your own documentation is the source AI pulls from isn't just a search tactic. It's how you keep your story accurate and keep your work moving forward, instead of watching it get flattened into someone else's summary.

What this actually means for your nonprofit online

Here's the part that should feel like relief: none of this asks you to get louder, weirder or more "on brand." It asks you to do less pretending and more proving. Show the work. Show the people. Let the algorithm find you doing the thing you're actually good at, instead of trying to out-shout accounts that were never your competition to begin with or hoping to be stumbled upon via hashtag soup.

The real question is whether what you post could hold up to a stranger asking, "how do I know this is real?" That's a content question, a design question and a strategy question all at once, and it's the kind of work that's easy to know you need and hard to carve out time for.

That's the work we do at Black Sheep Agency. We help mission-driven organizations turn what's already true about them- the real stories, the real people, the real process- into content and strategy built for a moment when that's exactly what gets rewarded.

Why Nonprofits Might Finally Win the Algorithm

The algorithm now rewards real stories and community over polish and AI content. See why nonprofits are positioned to win the shift and what to do next.

The algorithm stopped rewarding polish and started rewarding (human) proof

The algorithm now rewards real stories and community over polish and AI content. See why nonprofits are positioned to win the shift, and what to do next.

The Black Sheep blog is turning up the volume on community engagement, social media strategy, Houston happenings and what it means to lead a purpose-driven life.

The Black Sheep Agency | Social impact and nonprofit blog

We like to type as much as we like to listen.

We're not shy.