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.”
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See also: #epicFail
