Tag Archives: good donorship

Aid marketing I’d love to see…

29 Aug

Aid marketing I’d love to see in real life:

“Your $20 won’t end hunger. Heck, you know what? You could give even a million dollars and it wouldn’t end hunger. You know why? Because the causes of hunger are systemic and structural, not financial. There is enough food in the world right now for everyone, but unfortunately most of it is owned by people who won’t share with the rest. Will they ever share? No one knows. But your $20 helps us continue to try to take care of those with too little. Until those with too much decide to share (if they ever do).”

“You don’t have to like talking about condoms. They’re not really our favorite topic either. But talking about condoms is a whole hell of a lot better than talking about a lot of dead people who died of HIV/AIDS. It’s been proven time and again that the most effective means of preventing HIV transmission is consistent, correct condom use. Nope – promoting abstinence doesn’t work. We’ve tried it. It doesn’t work (seriously, did it work in your high school? No? Didn’t think so. Don’t know why you’d think it would work anywhere else). No, you don’t have to like talking about condoms, but you’d better understand that condoms save lives. Simple as that. What more reason do you need to get behind this program?”

“We seriously messed up. More than once, actually. All the time, actually. Disaster response is impossible to get 100% right 100% of the time. You know how it is from watching TV: it’s a disaster. We go in, the power doesn’t work, we can’t communicate, it’s chaotic, logistics are impossible… Sometimes it’s dangerous. Sometimes our own people get sick. There’s never enough of the right information for making good decisions. Sometimes we get it wrong. So why should you keep supporting us? Because no matter how bad the situation is, we will still go there and help as many people as we possibly can. And we will always be straight with you about how we’ve messed up. And we will learn from our mistakes so that we don’t repeat them next time.”

“Your donation may go towards helping terrorists. That is a reality that we live with out in the field every single day. How? Maybe they’ll steal it from us. Maybe they’ll steal it from ‘our beneficiaries’. Maybe the host government will confiscate it from us and then give it to them. Or maybe we’ll just give it to them because they might just be legitimate beneficiaries, too. Just because someone thinks they hate you doesn’t mean you can’t help them if you’re able and they need it.”

“No, you won’t get your name on a plaque in the entrance to the clinic. You won’t get a picture of ‘your’ cow or goat or duck or whatever. You won’t get a heart-warming letter from a kid in an impoverished third-world village. Your name won’t be called at a fancy gala. We won’t have a special fundraising rep assigned just to you, who has you on speed-dial and who will scramble to find answers to your random, off-the-wall questions. Sorry. That’s not what we’re about.”

“Three years from now this place is still gonna suck. It sucked before the disaster, and it’s gonna suck even more for a very long time after. Honest-to-god, if we could change that reality we would. But we can’t. It takes a long time to recover from a big disaster. And during that long time that it takes to recover, people are going to need shelter, water, sanitation, health care, food. Yep, we know: it looks really bad. It looks like nothing’s changed in the six months since the disaster. And while we can’t exactly measure the number of people who didn’t die of dysentery or cholera or the number of people who didn’t starve to death or become malnourished, we can tell you that things would be a lot worse had we not been here doing our job with your generous support. Thank you for that. And just so that you know, three years from now it’ll still suck, and we’ll still be here.

“Only about half of your donation goes ‘directly to beneficiaries.’ Maybe even less than that if you only count our cash transfer programs. Why so little? Well, first, just so you know, 50% is a pretty average actual overhead rate. And second, we’d love to give more, but we can’t. Did you donate online? It costs us money to maintain a website and the bank charges us for electronic transactions. Did you send a check? Yep, costs us money to receive those, too. You say you chose us because we provided the best information about our programs? You would not believe how much work it is to put those reports together (we had to pay someone to do it!). Costs a lot to publish them, too. Love those photographs? They cost extra. You say you like us because we work in the most difficult places? Hard to find people to work there (even the locals are dying to leave), and you know the saying, ‘Pay peanuts, get monkeys…’ Or you like us because we ‘build local capacity’? Our own local staff need salaries, too.”

“There’s no happy ending here. If we told you otherwise we’d be lying. These people were suffering before we came, and they’ll be suffering long after we’re gone. The causes of their suffering – the real, big picture causes – are beyond most anyone’s control. Certainly beyond our control. All we can do, really, is bring a little humanity into a situation that should never have existed in the first place. We can make things a little better, a little more bearable for a few of them for a short period. Is it enough? No. The need is far beyond what we can address. Will our help last? No. By next week or next month we’ll be back to square one. Or maybe they’ll all be dead by then. We sure hope not. But either way, our relief effort is still worth doing because they are our fellow humans and they’re suffering and we have the ability to do something about it. Even if it’s only a little.”

* * * * * * * * *

See also: #epicFail

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No strings attached

9 Aug

“The book’s popularity stems from its forceful, uncomplicated theme—terrorism can be eradicated by educating children in impoverished societies…”

–Jon Krakauer in Three Cups of Deceit (writing about Three Cups of Tea)

I get that probably two-thirds (rough guesstimate) of the humanitarian aid endeavor is about persuading those with power and/or wealth, to care more about those without power or wealth. “The poor”, if you will.

I also get that those with power and/or wealth, got where they are by being shrewd. They got where they are by making smart choices, by being calculated, skeptical, maybe even manipulative. They got their power and their wealth by having a vision and a plan, by knowing exactly what they wanted and by not settling for less and certainly by not throwing money or effort at useless stuff. I understand the in-principle value of “return on investment” (ROI). And in the context of humanitarian funding I understand the thinking that goes into deciding which relief and development initiatives to fund, where.

But, see, the point that everyone seems to continue missing is this:

Humanitarian relief and development are not good investments. At least not in the traditional return-on-investment sense.

It is absolutely critical that we stop valuating aid on the basis of for-profit sector values and priorities. It is absolutely critical that we stop using for-profit sector ROI calculus to determine what to support and implement, and what to leave by the wayside. It is beyond critical that we stop trying articulate what we will get back in order to justify a priori what we will do.

I understand very well the mentality of wanting to find something that is somehow mutually beneficial, something that is somehow the holy grail of multi-stakeholder synergy, the elusive “win-win.” I understand very well that many donors have many priorities, and I understand that they may have those many priorities for many reasons. And I understand that at some level everyone involved in the humanitarian enterprise gains something.

But that reality as may be, I still cannot shake the feeling that the poor need what they need. They need it on their terms. They need it on their schedule. And it is our job, whether as humanitarian workers or as donors truly committed to doing good, to provide that. Not more, not less, not something else. That. Whatever it is that the poor need.

It’s easy and even kinda fun to jump on Greg Mortensen lately. Idiot amateur should have known better. Changing the world is a lot harder than it looks. But as much as I applaud Jon Krakauer for his exceptionally well-researched take-down, when you get down to it my real issue with Three Cups of Tea is not just or maybe not even mainly the fact that Mortensen fudged the facts about when and where and whether or not he was kidnapped or the number of schools the Central Asia Institute really built. We all Botox our own narratives to make a point now and again.

No. When you get down to it, my real issue with Three Cups of Tea and the associated pop-culture fervor that surrounds the concept is that it is not really about helping the poor. Three Cups of Tea is not about building schools or educating little Pakistani girls. It is about eradicating terrorism. And that’s why I suspect it resonates in places like Cheyenne, Wyoming. And that is also what’s wrong with it – that ROI thinking. “If we build schools in Pakistan, we eradicate terrorism…”

We should want to build schools and educate little Pakistani girls simply because little Pakistani girls deserve to be educated just like everyone else. Or Nigerian girls. Or Guatemalan children. Or whomever, or whatever.

The poor need what they need. And it is our job, whether as humanitarian workers or as donors truly committed to doing good, to provide that.

Honest-to-god, I struggle to see why that is such a difficult concept to grasp. It is also where I see for-profit sector thinking being both the most different from and also the most damaging to humanitarian aid.

If we are looking for a return on investment, whether that means “eradicating terrorism” or market penetration or just “treasure in Heaven”, we are already distracted from what should be the central concern of the humanitarian endeavor. The poor need what they need. And if we base decisions about what organizations, programs, initiatives or campaigns to fund on return-on-investment thinking, we will consistently plan and implement and fund the wrong things. We will consistently plan and implement the wrong things because we will consistently plan and implement based on what we want to do rather than what is really needed. Our supposed right to help will trump the reality that the poor, very simply, need what they need.

This is not the for-profit sector. In the humanitarian world we should do something because it is the right thing to do. Not because we advance a cause of ours or get something back. In the humanitarian world we often get nothing – at least nothing that would resonate in the for-profit world – in return for our investment. Nor should we expect anything in return.

Call me a purist, and I’ll thank you for it. But humanitarian aid and development should be gifts given with no strings attached.

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#epicFail

6 Mar

I’m intrigued by what feels like a recent upsurge in calls for aid organizations, aid providers to admit failure. Two very quick examples (there are many others): Daniela Papi calling for NGOs to show her their failures; and a whole organization Admit Failure (@admitfailure), dedicated specifically to – you guessed it – admitting failure.

The overall tenor of these calls for aid organizations to admit failure seems to imply that, in fact, aid organizations have something to hide, that they’ve been dishonest, that they’re trying to somehow dress up botched programming as success. And fair enough: whether organizationally or personally, we’re as self-interested as anyone else.

I get it. Aid failure is the trendy issue du jour in the aid-watching world. But I think that before NGOs admitting failure becomes the trendy PR scheme du jour, it’s important to remember a couple of things about aid failure:

Not everyone agrees on what failure is. I and others have written before about the great divide between marketing and programs in NGOs. And it is hard to overstate the importance of that divide when it comes to understanding the differences between what NGOs typically tell the public and what they actually do. As @shotgunshack put it (in reference to the World Vision 100k T-shirts controversy):

“People forget that the gap between program and fundraising teams is huge and very contentious. I bet some people are secretly cracking up (over secretly consumed alcohol) at all the blogger heat World Vision USA’s marketing and PR teams are probably under for those 100,000 loser shirts. And secretly dreading the shaming they will face at the next INGO meeting with their program peers.”

It’s safe to assume that for every questionable aid program an NGO touts on it’s website which incurs a blogosphere dogpile, there is a wide range of internal opinion – not publicly expressed. I don’t just mean between marketing and programs, but within programs, too. There is often wide divergence of opinion about what works and what doesn’t among practitioners. NGOs are rarely unified internally (and I say “rarely” in order to give the benefit of the doubt, although I’ve never met one that was internally unified). And so whether NGO A is publicly admitting failure or publicly claiming credit for having made the world a better place, either way you can assume there are people working there who feel that the real truth is, in fact, the opposite.

Most aid programs are neither full successes nor total failures. This one is equally difficult for critics and cheerleaders alike. Despite many, many PR and advertising campaigns which convey the message that “your donation changes a life”, the reality is that most of the time aid gains are incremental: reducing malnutrition or improving maternal mortality rates in district X by a few per cent over a number of years. And while those kinds of gains are incredibly important, they represent slow, visually almost imperceptible change to the outsider. To the untrained eye, a village with a U5MR of 15% does not look that much different from one in the next province where five years of Child Survival have lowered the U5MR down to 9%.

And by the same token, very few of those programs that get slammed on the aid pundit blogsites can truly be linked to measurable harm. Sure, there are those famously harmful, spectacular aid failures that everyone knows about. The whole mess than ensued following the Rwanda genocides, for example. But my honest opinion is that more often than not those programs we all like to rant about – all the BOGO, GIK “win-win”, celebrity aid worker, church volunteer groups, shoe-and-bra-collecting, losers-without-borders dumbassery – are just lame, inefficient, distractions. More often than not, the real harm they cause is simply that they perpetuate incorrect thinking about poverty and the remedies to it, rather than that they directly contribute to some kind of local system failure.

* * *

I’m not going to try to defend NGOs.

We do need to be more transparent in general and open about the non-uniform and too-often marginal success of our programs specifically. We can do far better than we do. And while what we do does matter, it is also a reality that most of the time what we actually accomplish is far more bland than what our glossy propaganda makes it all out to be.

On the other hand, I’m also not going to go totally cynical (for a change) and make it seem like it’s all bottom-line driven, money-grubbing marketing. Although there’s certainly some evidence to support that perspective, too, most of the marketers who I know and work with personally are (I believe) honest people who genuinely want to be part of making the world better. Unfortunately they mostly do not really understand in any real depth the product that they’re selling. They don’t know what they don’t know.

And to me, that is the real failure. How in the world can we ever hope to educate our donors (as Saundra is so valiantly trying to do), if our own colleagues do not even really get it?

Those of us who know programs and who implement stuff in the field need to share what we know with our colleagues in marketing, comms, and PR – colleagues who, in many, many instances are eager to learn and are even more excited by the reality of what we do than they were at their previous beliefs in the happy propaganda (and why wouldn’t they be? Good aid, properly implemented, makes good sense and, more importantly, works).

I believe the day is coming when it will be standard practice for NGOs to publish unedited program evaluation and financial data on their websites, open for review by anyone who might be interested. Ms. Papi along with everyone else will see our failures, as well as our success, and everything else in between laid out in plain text and numerical data with a few mouse clicks. But if we don’t get our own non-practitioner colleagues on the same good aid page as us, if they don’t understand what we do and why so that they can represent that on to Our constituents, we will be in for a world of hurt…

That would be an #epicFail.

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