A week or so ago, I wrote about the (LESS) campaign– a ‘buy less crap’ response to the well-intentioned but mostly ineffective (RED) campaign to which the likes of Bono, Oprah, the Gap and Apple have subscribed. I want to thank you all for the comments you sent in in response to my post. I also wanted to share this clip from CNN that speaks to the tension between the (RED) campaign and responses from non-profits like (LESS). The gist of the story is that despite the widespread public perception that (RED) is effective — most likely due to the media blitz that accompanied (RED) — the campaign has been far more expensive to implement and market ($100M) than the donations that have resulted ($18M). As before, I encourage you all to leave comments with your opinions about this topic. What’s the most effective way to conduct important fundraising campaigns? Are these (RED) companies serious about making significant contributions, or are they more concerned with the PR exposure? I’m excited to hear your thoughts.
It seems a bit of a straw man to compare the cost of program implementation with the amount of donations received. This implies that 82M dollars was wasted that could have been spent on the cause, which isn’t the case.
Marketing money is just that - a line item in the budget of these huge companies product launches. Should they have chosen not to participate in the program, that money would have been diverted to other product launches not given to foundations. So would you rather have corporate partnerships and 18 million dollars or ideological purity and empty hands? Would you rather buy a phone where you know a portion of your money is going to a good cause, or just buy a phone?
People are quick to call out corporations who are waking up to social consciousness and environmentalism as pretenders and opportunistic. So what if that is the motive (which you have know real way of knowing), it doesn’t change the fact that the end result is money for the cause where there would have been none. Could they do better - of course. Couldn’t we all do better.
Instead of questioning motives and staying away, participate in the program and lobby for more of them. Like it or not corporations hold most of the cards in our society - it’s clear that government is out to lunch on the big social and environmental issues of the day. The more successful these programs are, the more of them there will be - because it makes business sense. The last thing we need is a purist backlash that would make campaigns like this unattractive.
All companies of the size that are participating in the (RED) campaign have separate budgets for philanthropy - which I would take to mean that they are indeed serious about making contributions and fund raising. When complaining about the effectiveness of someones efforts - ask yourself, compare to what? Who is doing better than 18M right now?
david
Tuesday, 03.06.07 @ 11:01 am
That’s crazy. Obviously, why not just take the $100 mil and give that away. Rather than trying to sell crap that no one really wants and makes less than a quarter of what was spent on it. It is definitely all PR. But then again it is GAP we are talking about… Have a good day.
But other than that, the biggest problem with these NGOs, non-profits (Bill and Melinda) or the private and corporate donors is that they ALL require a bottom line. The bottom lines are in the nature of “X number of people got ARVs for AIDS prevention,” etc. What this is doing is taking locally trained medical officials from these nations (Mozambique, Zimbabwe, etc) to fulfill these requirements. Good, right?
Sorta. While these doctors and nurses are attracted to these international philanthropic organizations with lucrative salaries and good working conditions, their mission is in fact HURTING the people they intend to care for. By focusing on AIDS or TB or MALARIA prevention, while using the majority of the area’s medical community, these organizations are LOWERING life expectancy rates because people are dying of less flashy or “buzzword”-ish diseases, such as the flu or coughing babies or the common cold or dirty water.
So while I applaud these acts of contribution they are very I’ll advised in their direction and are in fact raising the death toll in these nations by lowering simple health standards. The moral of the story is you cannot stop HIV if you cannot stop the flu. And that is the dilemma that these countries face that these organizations perpetuate.
RE: David & Luke’s comments - again, I ask compared to what?
There isn’t much I can respond to in David’s comments as they aren’t grounded in any serious argument - yes let’s give all money away, and why stop at 100 million, let’s just impose a 50% philanthropy tax on all monetary transactions… your bank account included, because anything less is just crazy.
Luke, I appreciate the argument you’re making, but it falls flat for me. Your position seems to be that all organizations involved in international aid should be funneling their resources to the basic health care needs of a population until such time as the mortality rate of the nation reaches a point where it becomes viable to treat what you consider, the flashy buzzword ailments.
I understand the discrepancies between the death rates of diseases, and the western popularity among the elite donor class isn’t always where you would like it to be, but groups focus on different issues. If you really follow the argument down the food chain, shouldn’t all international aid be going to building modern infrastructure throughout the under developed world to eradicate waterborne diseases like dysentery? Diarrhea is implicated in the death of four to six million people of all ages every year around the globe. And for children, which account for about 2 million of those deaths there is no approved treatment - just prevention through sanitation and hygiene. And that’s just diarrhea…
There are groups doing good work in all of these areas, the problem of course is that success at addressing an epidemic as big as malaria really depends on the cooperation of competent central governments - and a significant number of the worst afflicted countries have no effective government to speak of. The best NGOs can do on there own is distribute insecticide impregnated bed nets and the limited number treatment pills they can afford. There seems to be a silent consensus that spraying DDT could significantly and rapidly reduce malaria deaths cost effectively over vast areas - but it is politically unfeasible to suggest that in western circles because of DDTs domestic history, which seems impossibly immoral to me, but I’m open to disagreement.
Long story short - I don’t agree that you can’t stop HIV without stopping the flu, but I do believe that you can’t stop dysentery without providing modern sanitation infrastructure. The amount of work to be done in eradicating epidemic diseases is quite unfathomable, but there are people doing the work. The donor class is finite and their attention, like our own, cannot be directed everywhere at once. In the same way that we would not condemn money going to victims of the Tsunami, let us not condemn AIDS groups for not directing their resources towards malaria work.
The RED campaign has been successful in attracting the attention of people who are in a position to raise money to help fight the HIV/AIDS pandemic. As the donations are being raised from the sale of products, it is not zero sum - that money is not being taken from other areas of research, it’s a new source of revenue. It is consumer based philanthropy. And as consumerism isn’t going away any time soon, I suggest we need a lot more of it, not less of it.
