Tag Archives: Third Audience

… just so that you’re aware…

28 Dec

I have a positively jam-packed travel calendar shaping up, starting in mid-January… from then you can expect more tales from my own hood, somewhere in CentralSoutheastAsiaMiddleEast Until then, you’re stuck with rambling pontification.

Here’s a bit about raising awareness:

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A number of people have commented, DM’d me or sent me email about raising awareness. “Yes”, they say. “Of course awareness-raising isn’t an actual solution. … but still,  isn’t it a good thing?”

Of course it’s a good thing. I’ve said so before, and I’m almost positive I never said it’s a bad thing. But as we know it up to now, at least in the United States (although I suspect in other Western developed countries as well), it is an incomplete thing. And very often it is a badly managed thing.

In case I’ve been unclear up to now, I am not patently against The Journalist or the Rock Star or The Actress (and if you’ve been following this blog for very long, you know exactly who I mean) running the flag up the pole on HIV/AIDS or Afghanistan. I’ve pointed out before that this kind of awareness-raising stops short of actual solutions. Which is true. But as I think about it, even more than that, what’s missing in all of the awareness-raising that I see going on around me is any kind of meaningful attention to the concept of solutions more broadly.

After getting all worked up about Darfur or some other complex humanitarian emergency, most people do not really want to hear that the honest-to-god very best things they can do are send money to active implementing agencies that don’t suck and vote Democrat. Okay, maybe that’s putting it a bit simplistically, but it’s not far off.

As Martha Cook (here’s her blog) has commented, these situations are complex and complexity tends to turn people off, and I’d agree with her. I’d add/expand that in the vast majority of cases, the terrible situations around the world did not come about quickly, but rather are simply the result of years – perhaps decades or even centuries – of trouble brewing. And by the same token, there are no quick fixes. Solutions also take years, and even then are by no means guaranteed. And that, too, is a very difficult message for Western people, perhaps particularly Americans, to hear. We’re used to Jiffy-Lube and Taco Bell and broadband and problems that get sorted out in 30-45 minutes while we browse Barnes & Noble across the street.

And that, in my opinion, is where awareness-raising as such has really fallen short. The celebrities do the inform-people-about-the-over-the-top terrible things that happen bit very well. But they’re considerably less adept at getting across that complexity – specifically the notion that there are no quick fixes. We want to send the Marines to sort it out; vaccinate everyone – problem solved; They got no water? Easy, drill some wells. All done.

I think for Americans as well, there’s the myth of our own political and technological greatness that has to be though through. We eradicated malaria from Mississippi, for goodness sake – why on earth is Uganda so hard? We build GPS units that come pre-programmed with Nordstrom locations nation-wide, but we can’t seem to pin-point a few donkey carts smuggling heroin around Central Asia. From the comfort and safety of homes in North America the Israel/Palestine issue can feel like a no-brainer.

This is where aid agencies, NGOs, the professionals have quite simply fallen down. We’ve addicted our Third Audience to happy, one-paragraph stories about how $30 saved little N’bmbwe from a life a sweatshop slavery in Ouagadougou. Thanks to us, they’re hooked on factually accurate, but also hyper-simplistic soundbites about bednets and birthing kits and heifers.

Not every “ordinary citizen” has to be a student of the nuanced complexity that is international aid. But we most definitely need to do a better job at educating our constituents and supporters about the reality that it is nuanced and complicated. They don’t have to bone up on the details of situation X (although it’s certainly not a bad thing if they do), but we do need them to understand that there is no magik bullet; that there is no one intervention that fixes everything; that we don’t just hand out the NFIs in the disaster zone and that’s it, situation returned to normal; that solutions take time.

Nicholas and Bono and Anglina have got the public’s attention. Good for them.

Now we, the practitioners need to do a bit of awareness-raising of our own.

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Part 3 of 3: Cause. And also Effect (or not)

21 Dec

It’s not that I mind so much the experts and the celebrities being experts and celebrities.

I’m not necessarily against books like Half the Sky or causes like the One Campaign in principle. The fact that more people in the developed world know more now than they used to about the issues in the developing world is something that I see as a good thing.

And so I try very hard to have an open mind when I see famous journalists or rock stars or actresses going on about “Africa” this or “refugees” that. These people can and often do self-educate about whatever issue or cause they’re passionate about to the point that they may even become legitimate experts in the subject matter in their own right. …Much as it may at times pain me to admit (although staying clear on the difference between “expert” and “professional” helps). In many cases I totally agree with the issues that the celebrities and famous journalists raise. Who in the world would be outspokenly against research on muscular dystrophy, not care at all about global warming or favor the oppression of Kurdistan?

But too often, at least in modern Western popular culture, awareness raising stops at just that. Ann Curry can tell us all about how bad women have it in different parts of the world, and she may be absolutely right. Bono and Angelina may have a higher hill than almost anyone else from which to shout their messages of awareness-raising on HIV/AIDS or non-refoulement, and they may be perfectly justified in doing so. They are all in their own ways very adept at getting their messages into the public sphere and stirring deep emotional responses within us.

But where they consistently fall short is in telling us what to do about any it. In the absence of some commonly understood means by which the ordinary citizens of [INSERT NAME OF SMALL TOWN IN A DEVELOPED COUNTRY] can be part of the solution, we’re left with causes.

And for the non-aid workers reading (I know there are some), I hate to be the one to break this to you, but supporting a cause is not the same thing as supporting a solution. Having a “COEXIST” bumper sticker on your car or wearing a “Save Darfur” T-shirt or re-watching “Beyond Borders” do not result in people being less prejudiced, the Janjaweed voluntarily disarming, or an end to oppression, respectively.

A couple of months ago during happy hour I saw the words “FREE TIBET!” grafittied on the wall in the men’s room of a grungy/trendy pub near DuPont Circle. And in that moment it struck me that that was probably far more apt than whoever wrote it knew. As often as not, at the end of the day there is no effective difference between buying the “awareness edition” of someone’s CD, boycotting a particular brand of athletic wear, slapping a catchy, liberal bumper sticker on your hybrid Civic or just writing your message on the wall above the urinal.

While the increasing emphasis on awareness-raising on a range of social issues the world over during the past few years is not a bad thing per se, it has all basically been foreplay without follow-through. A generation of Oprah-watching housewives and regular guys alike are left flustered and frustrated, believing that their best options include things like: buy yet another book, buy U2 CDs, start your own NGO or movement, send a bunch of shoes to another country…

I’m not down on anyone for caring. But it has to be said: there remain massive logical gaps between knowledge and passion and action that actually does help.

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Where does this leave us?

Sadly, I have no incisively brilliant end-all sage advice to give. I think that intentionally weaning ourselves and our Third Audience constituents off of development porn is an important first step. We need to treat them like they’re intelligent and stop just assuming that pictures of cute kids with big brown eyes are going to pull at heartstrings and purse strings alike. Part of this will also involve us being able to think past fundraising as the key/only purpose of public communication.

I think that another would be countering some of the “yes, you can make a difference in the world” rhetoric out there with a dose of reality: yes, surely enough, you can make a difference. Blogspot and Paypal and Travelocity make that all possible for pretty much anyone to have their own NGO and change the world, literally. But what kind of difference? It’s not just that aid is increasingly a professional field (it is), but also that it is very possible for the motivated but uninformed to do some real damage out in the field. Maybe we can’t prevent them from going out and making that difference, but hopefully we can at least persuade some.

As unsexy as it is, we have to make the point that for those who want to help internationally, the very best course of action is to donate cash to organizations that are actually doing something. Everyone wants to wear a T-shirt or “speak out” on this or that, or graffiti the bathroom wall. But if you really want to help the earthquake victims or the child soldiers or malnourished mothers, support the work of credible professionals financially. Here again, insh’allah, we can help to educate those supporters about what good, effective interventions look like and which are worth supporting.

Perhaps most importantly, I think that as in industry we’ve undersold the importance of local activism on local issues. In our international work we talk about the critical importance of local knowledge and local participation. But we forget to remind our Third Audience that they are themselves local experts in their own communities. You may not be able to directly affect the prevalence of rape as a weapon of war in DRC, but you can most certainly petition, lobby, talk to city council members, write to congressional representatives, etc. about issues related to making your own community a safer place.

Books like Half the Sky tend to raise awareness about the horrible things that are perpetrated on women in other countries. And they are terrible things. But it’s too easy to read a book like that and the take-away be that it’s the awful “Pakistanis” or “Africans” or whomever that do those things, and to totally forget that awful things happen to people in our own “civilized” countries as well. We’ve said it so many times that we’ve forgotten the essence of “Think globally, act locally.”

It’s time to reconnect ourselves and Third Audience with what that means.

My New  Year’s Resolution this year is to take the time to patiently explain humanitarian aid work to non-insiders…

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Stepping off soab-box… now.

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Part 2 of 3: “You Can’t Handle the Truth”

16 Dec

It’s hard to deny that there’s a rising tide of emotionally-driven conversation spilling over into the general public right now around how we, the NGOs and aid practitioners, represent our work externally. The whole discussion around Kiva (www.kiva.org) is about as good an example as any (although it’s not the only good example out there). The “Executive Summary” here will bring you up to speed on that conversation, in case you missed it before.

What I find most interesting about the Kiva discussion, though, is that most micro-finance technicians (or at least those that I talk to) seem to agree: Kiva supports sound, properly planned and implemented micro-credit in the field. Very few are questioning that Kiva-supported credit programs help the poor. Or at least no one that I’ve come across thus far is choosing to grind that axe. Instead, it would be fair to say that the recent blogosphere fervor around Kiva is almost exclusively focused on the way that they market their product to donors online. The issue boils down to, “is Kiva dishonest? Did they withhold facts from their donors?”

I won’t answer for Kiva. But I will answer for the entire aid industry:

We do not tell the whole truth to the general public about what we do with their money.

We don’t. We just don’t.

And it’s not just one or two of us. It’s not the odd, outlier NGO who does a bit of wordsmithing in it’s “Gift Catalogue” (or whatever it’s called). There’s no point in calling out by name the one or two NGOs who bury the “truth” in fine print or withhold it entirely… because it really is industry-wide. In nearly twenty years in the business, I have yet to see a convincing example of an NGO anywhere that was utterly and totally transparent with it’s constituent donor base about how funds were used.

And while, if you were to ask the fundraising and marketing a PR staff of NGOs around the world about why, exactly, we are not totally transparent, you’d hear a very wide range of explanations for why this is the case. Some of them are very sound explanations, in my opinion. There are some very good reasons why we aren’t and probably can’t implement policies of total transparency, but if you think about it, they all boil down to this:

We don’t really trust them.

Re-read Part 1.5. You can kind of see why we’re (all) a bit reticent about sharing raw descriptions of methodology, strategies based on years of accumulated specialized data, or lessons-learned documents – unfiltered and in a contextual vacuum – with non-aid insiders. The potential, not merely for simple misunderstanding, but for wildly inaccurate conclusions about… aid.

We’re afraid that if we were really transparent – really transparent, but without the chance to explain fully – people would misunderstand stop supporting our work. We’re afraid that if we were straight up with our constituent donor bases about how we do community development and relief programming, and how we use donor dollars – really use them – how we really decide on budget categories, how we make the decisions about “why here and not there?”… that those donations – our lifeblood – would dry up. I trust I don’t really need to explain why this would be a bad thing…

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The hubbub in recent months around Kiva illustrates the power of a “personal connection” as a fundraising tool in aid. It puts us in a challenging position. Person to person (P2P) giving gets closer to being a real, feasible possibility each day. Yet it remains horribly problematic: can you imagine the Facebook commentors highlighted in the previous post in a situation where they were donating directly to a specific other “needy” person in another country? That thought makes me cringe… and yet this is what various respected voices (last link to The Kristof for a while, promise!) on the subject of aid are suggesting.

As I wrote in Part 1, the general public seems to fundamentally misunderstand how the aid world works. We need to step up our game on the public information and education side. We need to do it because the more people who understand what we do and the issues we deal with, the more potential there will be for positive change in the world.

We have to take seriously the changing role of the public – that Third Audience – in our work. We have to recognize that, just like our more traditional donors, our Third Audience has an array of “rights” and perhaps also obligations in their relationships with us, the deliverers of aid.

Maybe we need something like a “donor’s ‘Bill or Rights’” – a code of conduct that outlines our obligations (and also the limits of those obligations) to Third Audience donors: our obligation to eventually come clean with the public about what we do and how we do it, not because we have anything to hide, but because many of those who help foot the bill just don’t know.

We also need to do it because like it or not our Third Audience really are increasingly stakeholders in what we do.

We need to be able to tell them what we do.

And we need to be able to trust them…

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