Chad Boettcher to Head Social Action and Advocacy for Participant Media

Social Action Division Integral to Participant’s Unique Position in the Entertainment Industry

Chad Boettcher will join Participant Media as Executive Vice President, Social Action and Advocacy, effective November 28, it was announced today by Jim Berk, CEO. As head of Participant’s Social Action division, Boettcher will be responsible for leading the creation, development and execution of multi-platform Social Action and Advocacy campaigns for all of Participant content. These campaigns inspire citizen awareness, education and engagement in order to create active communities engaged in positive social change. In hiring Boettcher, Participant looks to build on the extraordinary success of its Social Action initiatives this past year with its campaigns for its slate of films including Waiting for “Superman”and Contagion. The Waiting for “Superman”campaign has already reached over 30 million people, and included over 5000 DVD House parties, 1400 Boys & Girls Club events, 15 Local Town Halls and 1 National Town Hall, 15 State Capital screenings and 50 panels and conferences. To date, over 2 million people have visited Participant’s online Social Action “hub” forContagion at TakePart.com/Contagion. Berk said, “Social Action is at the heart of what differentiates Participant from other media companies in that we take the film experience from the screen into the community to create on-going pro-social engagement. With his range of public affairs and corporate responsibility experience in the worlds of business, politics, television and sports, and his penchant for developing new and innovative approaches to social and environmental change, Chad is exactly the kind of dynamic, well-rounded executive we’ve envisioned to lead our Social Action team.” Boettcher, who founded the digital co-creation platform Goodzuma and teaches marketing innovation at NYU, was most recently the Senior Vice President of Social Innovation at Weber Shandwick. There he helped lead a social innovation team that advised a wide range of corporate clients on issues in corporate social responsibility, citizenship, sustainability and cause marketing. He has also worked with a variety of nonprofit organizations, including the Gill Foundation, with whom he and his team co-authored “Business of Change” – a guide to corporate-nonprofit collaboration to promote LGBT equality. Prior to his work at Weber Shandwick, Boettcher worked at Nike where he was the US Director, and then Global Director, of Corporate Responsibility. His work included the Let Me Play campaign to unleash the human potential through sport; the Reuse-A-Shoe program that recycles old athletic sneakers and turns them into sport surfaces; and the Nike Summer Shoes initiative with the National Recreation and Park Association that gave nearly every high schooler in New Orleans a free pair of athletic shoes after Hurricane Katrina so they could start leading active, healthy lives again. Boettcher also worked for MTV: Music Television as Senior Director of Strategic Partnerships and Public Affairs. There he turned MTV’s traditional Spring Break on its head with Alternative Spring Break and sent young people to the Gulf Coast to help rebuild after Hurricane Katrina with United Way Worldwide. He also launched the channel’s first partnership on high school education with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, developed programs and partnerships for the Choose or Lose voter education initiative in the 2004 presidential campaign, and led the channel’s Emmy award-winning partnership on sexual health with the Kaiser Family Foundation. Boettcher, who is the National Co-Chair of the Gay Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), graduated from Miami University with a B.A. in Political Science, Spanish and Botany and is an avid sports enthusiast. Participant Media (participantmedia.com) is an entertainment company that focuses on documentary and narrative feature films, television, publishing and digital content about the real issues that shape our lives. For each of its projects, Participant creates social action and advocacy programs to transform the impact of the media experience into individual and community action. Participant’s online Social Action Network is TakePart (takepart.com). Founded by Chairman Jeff Skoll in 2004, Jim Berk serves as CEO and Ricky Strauss as President. Participant’s films include The Kite Runner, Charlie Wilson’s War, An Inconvenient Truth, Good Night, and Good Luck, The Visitor, Food, Inc., The Cove, The Crazies, Countdown to Zero, Waiting for “Superman,” Fair Game, PAGE ONE: Inside The New York Times, The Help and Contagion.