An Internet Hot Spot’s Cold Response: When Calling Something an ‘Experiment’ is no Safeguard from Critics

In one of the early scenes from the dystopian 70s cult classic Soylent Green the camera shows a largely homeless and grotesquely overpopulated New York City street whose riotous masses are cleared with dump trucks – called scoops – treated more like rubbish than people. And in later scenes the audience learns not only is prostitution legal, but the women that come with the little remaining luxury property that’s left are called “furniture.” Nice.

If only treating people like objects was confined to Charlton Heston-starring science fiction.

Instead, the recent marketing misstep by BBH Labs, the innovation arm of the international marketing agency BBH, has brought us all a notch lower on the “soylent slide.” Earlier this week, at the annual tech-fest better known as the SXSW technology conference, BBH Labs hired 13 volunteer homeless people to stand in as human mobile hot spots. Carrying Wi-Fi devices and wearing t-shirts that read: “I’m [name] a 4G Hotspot,” the volunteers were enlisted to help prevent the overload of the existing mobile network, a common occurrence at tech-crowded events. It was also intended as a conversation starter – homeless workers would have an opportunity to speak with mobile users about their plight and discuss America’s homeless problem. And who knows, maybe a chance encounter would aid their employment and housing prospects?

In fact, Saneel Radia, the director of innovation at BBH Labs, who was quoted in a New York Times story about the Austin, Texas event, seemed utterly surprised by the public backlash.

“We saw it as a means to raise awareness by giving homeless people a way to engage with mainstream society and talk to people,” he said. “The hot spot is a way for them to tell their story.”

Somehow I think that positive outcome is unlikely, especially when you start with turning homeless people into an awkward marketing ploy while treating them like glorified telephone poles –albeit telephone poles with enough of a human voice to request that their 4G “customers” consider a donation to help them survive. While it’s true that these unlucky 13 did volunteer for their services and were paid for their efforts (more on that later), the program speaks to the worst kind of human exploitation. It’s one thing to know your actions are exploitative and nevertheless carry them out based on some flawed “greater good” logic, but it’s another level entirely when you’re oblivious to that cruelty.

The marketing carelessness also highlights another disturbing trend related to technology, a term that Chris Klauda, a vice president at D.K. Shifflet & Associates, a travel and hospitality market research company calls, “isolated togetherness” – people in close physical spaces, but remaining disconnected from the “real world” and are instead solely focused on the goings on in their virtual worlds via their smartphones, tablets, laptops, etc.

As the technology through which we all communicate continues to advance, becoming more immersive, digitally interactive, and mobile, it’s critical we – not as public relations professionals but as moral, caring, and empathetic members of the human race – remember that treating people with respect isn’t just about asking for someone’s assistance or paying them for their efforts in some endeavor. Nor does calling a marketing misfire a “charitable experiment,” excuse BBH Labs from their decision. That kind of qualified and dare I say bullsh*t language serves no one. In fact, it’s the kind of language PR professionals rely on so often that gives our industry a bad reputation and further fans the flames of the media mess at the heart of this blog post.

For their efforts the 13 volunteers, selected from the Front Steps homeless shelter, earned themselves free t-shirts, $20 a day (which based on an 8-hour work day amounts to $2.50 an hour or about the same legal minimum wage in 1976, and $4.75 below today’s legal minimum), and the opportunity to collect some extra donations.

But if you ask me, and the many others who were similarly disturbed by this story, I think they all got a lot less than they bargained for. Consider this “charitable experiment” a dismal failure, and hopefully one that will not be re-dressed and re-hashed for the next South by Southwest technology conference.

They may not have been called furniture as in Soylent Green, but these 13 volunteers definitely served as a 2012 appliance.

Shame on us all.

An Organization With Terminal Cancer

The following article by Vanessa Horwell, Chief Visibility Officer of ThinkInk, originally appeared on Marketing Daily on 2/10/12. 

Here’s something that almost anyone from any side of the political spectrum can agree upon: the past week has been heinous for Susan G. Komen. And it has shown that the organization most known for its staunch (some, like me, would say steamrolling) support for finding a cure and raising awareness for a single type of cancer — breast cancer — above any other has a cancer all its own. It’s a cancer common to any group that has become bloated with a false sense of self-righteousness and one whose arrogance and hubris causes it to stray from its stated (if overzealous) mission and become embroiled in a politicized mess.

What I’m talking about, of course, is this week’s announcement that Karen Handel, Susan G. Komen’s vice president of public policy, jumped before she was pushed. A speedy resignation with no severance package, Handel excised herself from the organization before mounting pressure within the group would have forced her imminent departure.

Her resignation caps a week of intense public backlash over Susan G. Komen’s decision to first cut and then hurriedly restore about $680,000 in funding to Planned Parenthood, a provider of reproductive health services, including contraception and abortions.

In her resignation letter, which has been posted on Forbes, Handel goes to great lengths to explain how the situation got so out of control. Her defense? Komen is in the business of saving lives. Anything that distracts from that goal is a disservice — thus the decision to pull funding and divorce itself from a controversial organization that might be spending money illegally, like funding abortions.

In October 2011, during Breast Cancer Awareness Month, I wrote about how the “pinking” of America was diluting the message of curing cancer and replacing it with corporate capitalism and too much consumption. I also took issue with Susan G.’s near-bullying tactics as they related to how the fundraising and marketing gargantuan has left smaller cancer-fighting organizations to fend for themselves, and how they aggressively muscle out any group that seeks to challenge breast cancer as the only cancer worth raising money for.

This latest misstep only adds to my great concern that Susan G. Komen, for all the good it has admittedly done for breast cancer awareness, has become a monopolistic and politically compromised organization. If she were alive today, I wonder what Susan Goodman Komen — whom the organization gets its name from — would think. After what must have been a grueling fight for her life, finding a cure and staying true to the organization’s mission and goals would be more important to her then whether or not grant money was going to another group similarly charged with helping save the lives of young, often poor women — an organization that happens to provide abortions.

Letters of resignation aside, let’s not forget that Karen Handel is a former Georgia Republican gubernatorial candidate, whose campaign promises included cutting funding for Planned Parenthood, and was Georgia’s 26th Secretary of the State.

On Sunday, the Huffington Post reported that it had obtained an email exchange between Komen leadership confirming that Handel had the sole authority in crafting and implementing the Planned Parenthood policy.

Does this not have all the makings of a woman hell-bent on achieving a personal goal and using a behemoth organization which itself had become too politically connected, as cover to achieve her aims?

Yes — the organization did reverse course in barely 72 hours, and restored the funds. It also made changes to its grant awarding guidelines that say only organizations under criminal investigation would be denied funding. But like a true cancer, this organizational one has already done much damage — to those who truly believed in the structure of non-profits being “doers of good,” to those who held Komen as saviors of women, and to the brands who’ve invested heavily to be part of Komen’s shiny pink halo.

The upside to all this? Susan G. Komen’s misdeeds have opened up an enormous pathway for all the non-profits around the country, breast-cancer-related or not — to start reclaiming their place in consumers’ hearts, minds and wallets.

And as for the PR advice, first administered by Ari Fleisher and now Ogilvy, all I can say is that it will take a lot more than some clever PR tactics and new positioning to rebuild this country’s trust in the Susan G. Komen brand and its “values.”

The following article by Vanessa Horwell, Chief Visibility Officer of ThinkInk, originally appeared on Marketing Daily on 2/10/12. 

Singing The Blues For Pink

The following article by Vanessa Horwell, Chief Visibility Officer of Thinkink, originally appeared on Marketing Daily on 10/25/11.

For a color whose name doesn’t even get top billing on the visible spectrum of light, pink has certainly developed potent staying power. From the Pink Panther to pink Cadillacs, and everything in between, this dainty mixture of red and white has also come to symbolize a less benign issue: the hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars-a-year-fight against breast cancer – the third deadliest cancer in America today and No. 2 killer of women.

Are you surprised I didn’t say it was the No. 1 killer of women and the second deadliest cancer in the United States? You can thank the power of marketing for shifting those perceptions.

Not only has breast cancer taken more than 240,000 lives since 2005, according to Cancer.org, it has also commandeered an entire month through powerful — some would even say extreme, marketing influence. For the past 25 years, October’s ghosts and goblins have had to share the stage with the specter of breast cancer and its increasingly corporate-like kissing cousins – Breast Cancer Awareness Month and the inexorably linked Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation.

While no one can deny the impressive global awareness and funding these organizations have brought to the breast cancer cause – Susan G. Komen alone raised about $420 million in 2010 – am I the only one who thinks that all the merchandising: the pink ribbons, the pink-clad NFL teams, the Bank of America pink checking accounts, the pink armbands, pink lunchboxes, pink Kitchen Aid food processors  and whatever else has been Pink’d for October is diluting both the issue at hand and, in reality, siphoning more money toward profits than for research for an actual cure, and skewing public attention away from other serious cancers — or other causes, period?

When was the last time you paid attention to cervical cancer, or colorectal cancer? Why don’t any NLF teams wear ribbons to support Male Breast Cancer – something that kills, on average, 450 men per year?

Pinkwashing: Where Does All the Money Go?

In 2002, Breast Cancer Action launched a side project called “Think Before You Pink,” whose goal was to raise awareness over the types of companies that chose to go pink, and “encourages consumers to ask critical questions about pink-ribbon promotions.” Doing battle with so-called “pinkwashing,” their motto is “raise a stink.” Here, too, donations go to cancer research.  The organization asks consumers to do some research before a pink product is purchased, for example:

• How much money from your purchase actually goes toward breast cancer? Does it say so plainly on the box or packaging?
• Does the company you’re purchasing from have a cap on the amount it sends in donations regardless of the number of pink-related sales?
• Are funds being raised through direct purchase, or is a clever marketing scheme disguising the fact that you need to purchase additional merchandise from the company in order to make a donation?
• How, specifically, is your money being spent?

I was reminded of the need to research when I received an email from Etsy (a site for artisanal wares), promoting all things pink but without any visible endorsements. Showcased vendors were promoting their wares with descriptions such as, “This apron knot dress is a great way to show support for all those around us touched by Breast Cancer and a fashionable and fun way to show your support for the fight for a cure.”

I don’t know about you but I don’t that think fun and breast cancer belong in the same sentence, and it’s precisely this sort of overreach that at first confuses consumers (who exactly am I giving to?), then moves onto cause fatigue (not another pink promotion!!), and finally cause alienation (what a sell-out; I want nothing to do with that brand).

Have Sponsorship Dollars, Will Go Pink

Susan G’s overreach, too, seems to have gotten the organization into several snafus, the most notable when it partnered with Kentucky Fried Chicken to sell pink buckets of chicken to franchise operators, where 50 cents of every purchase went to the “For the Cure” campaign. Seriously, KFC?

Needless to say, the public and media backlash was acute, and the partnership short-lived. Is a pinkwashed KFC really going to unclog all those red blood vessels? Fried chicken is a well-known contributor to obesity, critics said, and obesity is also linked to cancer. How can a campaign be genuine if, on one hand, money goes to a worthy cause and, on the other hand, unnecessarily shines the spotlight on a fast food chain driving its sales and profits?

The truth is, it can’t.

Then there was the perfume brouhaha where independent testing of the chemicals in Susan G.’s Promise Me perfume revealed that some of them might be linked to cancer. For its part, the foundation released a statement saying that the levels of questionable ingredients fell “well within the guidelines of the International Fragrance Association,” but that out of an abundance of caution, the perfume’s formula was being tweaked.

Of course, the plot thickens when you consider the driver behind this story was cancer charity rival Breast Cancer Action. Is it possible their constant nitpicking is also part of their own marketing campaign called “my charity is better than/more deserving than yours?”

For consumers, it becomes very tiresome and, if that example raises questions of agenda bias on Breast Cancer Action’s part, this one won’t. Earlier this year, Stephen Colbert took Susan G. Komen to the court of public opinion when he teased the group’s million-dollar-plus effort to squash nonprofits that allegedly appropriated the “For the Cure” slogan. Who can blame these smaller nonprofits wanting to cash in on what’s become a multimillion-dollar marketing machine.

To Komen’s credit, the organization makes no bones about its size, its influence or the way it does business.

“It’s a democratization of a disease,” said Komen CEO Nancy G. Brinker, in a recent New York Timesarticle about the pinking of professional football. “It’s drilling down into the deepest pockets of America. …America is built on consumerism. To say we shouldn’t use it to solve the social ills that confront us doesn’t make sense to me.”

Raising awareness is all well and good, and Americans have huge hearts and pocketbooks when it comes to giving, but why must that awareness come with a pair of New Balance sneakers or a Kitchen Aid blender?

The truth is that it shouldn’t.  Since when did we start needing to get something in order to give?

Let’s Reconsider Our Disease Consumerism

Pink’s 2011 October reign is almost complete. Soon we’ll be on to November, which is officially recognized as Lung Cancer Awareness Month. You remember lung cancer, don’t you, the No. 1 American cancer killer that took nearly a million lives in fours years? It’s got a color and a ribbon, too, though it shares its pearl-colored badge of honor with multiple sclerosis. Only its marketing budget can’t compete with pink.

As we close out the final months of 2011, why don’t we leave the color spectrum and our “disease consumerism” aside? Perhaps my singing the blues over pink may convince others to think about the effect that one cause’s marketing efforts have had on so many others.

From breast to colorectal to pancreatic and prostate to ovarian, esophageal and all the insidious rest — cancer kills indiscriminately. Choose whichever form of runaway cell growth you want and re-focus on the color of money instead: donate all that you can directly to treatment and screening sources of these other unadvertised cancers – having done your research first, of course.

Trust me. That blender – pink or otherwise – can wait. Because all cancers and life-threatening diseases are equal-opportunity killers, even if the marketing budgets of the nonprofits that support them aren’t.

The following article by Vanessa Horwell, Chief Visibility Officer of Thinkink, originally appeared on Marketing Daily on 10/25/11.

10 Years Later: A Look At The Impact of 9/11 On Nonprofits And Giving

As most of the country spent yesterday, September 11, remembering and reflecting on the day of immense tragedy that took place 10 years ago, we also recounted that day, and how its events changed the course of our lives, businesses, outlook and, well, the world.

If you think about it, the period of 2001 to 2011 could go down in history as the “decade of disasters.”

Beginning with 9/11, threats of WMD, two (many will argue unnecessary) wars, a deep and still lingering recession bookended with a spate of natural disasters both at home and in every corner of the globe, and not least an extremely noxious political climate that threatens to divide the country: It’s hardly surprising that society’s capacity to empathize and to give often to charitable causes has diminished.

It’s The Economy Stupid

Of course, it’s important to remember the first victims of the “disaster decade,” even if a myriad of other events have shared the spotlight since, but a still-weak economy remains a sewer-sized drain on America’s almost empty wallets and has undoubtedly affected the bottom line of every nonprofit organization.

Data released last year (the most recent figures we have available) revealed that charitable giving dropped by a hefty 11 percent compared to 2009. At that time, nearly two-thirds of those surveyed in a Harris Interactive poll said they would be giving less than they were 12 months ago.

Worse still, the number of respondents who said they would be giving nothing as of last September doubled to 12 percent.

In the year since that report, the private sector has added a million new jobs (1.6 million from September ’10 to August ’11; 1.7 million from August ’10 to August ’11 – both figures seasonally adjusted from US Department of Labor: Bureau of Labor Statistics).

That may sound encouraging, but when you consider that at the height of the 2008 recession, American payrolls were contracting by some 800,000 jobs per month, it’s clear there is a very long way to go – in terms of job creation and rebuilding a society of Americans who have the capacity to give.

Today, some 14 million of our friends, families, and strangers remain out of work and the jobless predicament remains dire.

Perhaps we should look close to home and at our own neighbors to reignite our sense of empathy? Perhaps we should re-start our giving mindset by helping our fellow Americans – those 14 million who are jobless and in many cases homeless.  Their lives, after all, could have been ours. Perhaps 9/11 should be renamed Our National Day of Service, where Americans help fellow Americans – in any way they can.

Because charity begins right at home – around the corner, up the stairs, or across the street.  Perhaps then we can start to look outward again and start helping those organizations that rely on us to support their worthwhile causes and those in need.

Join us on I will to make your commitment to helping others in any way you can.

Who Can Nonprofits Turn To For Help?

Vanessa Horwell, Jan 27, 2010 05:00 AM There isn’t a person in this country (excluding, perhaps, Pat Robertson) who hasn’t been deeply saddened by what happened in Haiti on Jan. 12. Actually, make that most of the world. Watching the heart-wrenching coverage, we are reminded that natural disasters can strike anywhere, at anytime. It’s how we react and respond in times of need that can make a difference. For many, myself included, the crisis in Haiti is a throwback to August 2005, when Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf States and wiped out more than 850,000 homes and displaced several hundred thousand Americans. While the death toll doesn’t even compare with that of Haiti, millions of Americans lost their homes and more than $10 billion was spent on rebuilding levies, which devastated a land mass bigger than Haiti. But the fundraising efforts and how the country reacted then to today’s crisis is strikingly different. In just two days, the American Red Cross was able to raise $8 million, according to Mobile Marketer.com, with millions more raised by nonprofits, including Yéle, UN Foundation and the International Rescue Committee. Millions of people were moved and money was mobilized — instantaneously — thanks in large part to mobile donations. Just a year ago, however, most people hadn’t heard of mobile donations; only a handful of behind-the-scenes companies like GiveOnTheGo and mGive, that had been developing this powerful fundraising platform for charitable organizations, knew what was brewing in the mobile space. Now, sadly, thanks to the Haitian crisis, millions of consumers have been abruptly introduced to mobile giving overnight. And they don’t seem to have a problem with it. For nonprofits, fundraising — on any scale — is an operational imperative. Without supporting funds, there is no organization, period. And while mobile giving is being crowned as a charity’s newest savior, it’s a rather useless one if the organization doesn’t have a proper structure. And by proper structure, I mean a having robust and sensible PR and marketing strategy — of which mobile is a part. Simply having a mission and a vision to “do good” is all well and good, but it falls flat when no one knows about a nonprofit’s work. In today’s climate, a nonprofit has to market itself like a business, yet most don’t. I’m not talking about The Red Cross or Médecins Sans Frontières or Oxfam. I’m talking about the 1,569,572 or so nonprofits in this country that have set out to create change, to help those less fortunate and to make our world a much better place. They might not be selling products or services, but they are selling a cause. For many of those nonprofits, however, PR and marketing is ranked number 8 or 9 (10 being the least important). And where does PR/marketing rank for a for-profit company? Number 2, 3 or 4. So why the disparity? In working with nonprofits, I’ve found it to be an inherent part of the funding and grant-writing structure. Foundations and large donors enforce strict stipulations about the amount of money a nonprofit can spend to promote itself. And yet, if it doesn’t promote itself to endear its cause and mission to a new generation of donors and consumers, its fundraising and awareness building-efforts will be severely limited. It’s a Catch-22. I’m not saying that all nonprofits need to go crazy with big marketing budgets. But if they want the world, or even just their local community to know about their invaluable work and deeds, they need to invest in themselves and their story a lot more. In times of crisis, it’s clear that millions of people pay attention to these worthy organizations. But it’s the rest of the time that nonprofits have to worry about. Because that is the time when having a robust PR and marketing strategy can be the difference between success and failure for many of them. http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=121276&nid=110455

To Profit or Not to Profit?

That’s the million dollar question, right?

We recently came across an interesting argument about that topic on OpenForum.com, about a new breed of social entrepreneurs who are trying to create a “hybrid” organization, combine the best of both worlds – cause and social change, without being tied to grants and sponsors.

The article goes on to talk about tax incentives to reward consumers who are supporting socially good causes and whether the Obama administration’s Social Innovation Fund should be opened up to for-profit companies.

We think it’s a very interesting argument, and one that both sides should be closely watching.

So we’ve posted a discussion on our ThinkTank’s nonprofit discussion board – The ThinkTank for Nonprofits 

Go on, join in and tell us what you think.

VH

Nonprofits Pressured as Jobs Remain Open

By MIKE SPECTOR

Nonprofits, already strained from declining donations, are facing another problem that could compound their woes: widening vacancies in senior leadership positions.

Despite the swelling ranks of jobless Americans from big corporate firms, many charities have been searching for months to fill key management roles. All told, about 77,000 senior management positions were open at nonprofits in 2008, according to a survey by the Bridgespan Group, a Boston firm that advises nonprofits. Those vacancies were 43% higher than Bridgespan had forecast two years earlier. What’s more, an additional 24,000 senior positions are expected to open this year, Bridgespan found.

James Cleveland, president of Boston-based Jumpstart, a nonprofit that pairs college-student mentors with disadvantaged preschool children, has seen his staff stretched thin.

He would like to spend more time courting donors. Instead, he is often tied up overseeing the charity because he lacks a vice president of operations. Another unmet need: a vice president for government relations to help maintain the nonprofit’s AmeriCorps community-service funding and nurture other donor relationships.

Read the rest of the story:  http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124018469812233229.html

Non-profits explore ways to survive recession

Strategies from sector may help gay rights groups weather storm

Amy Cavanaugh
Friday, March 20, 2009

As the recession forces cost-cutting measures for families and businesses across the nation, many nonprofit organizations are working through budget reductions by partnering with other organizations to share employees and ideas to stay afloat.

The steps they’re taking may offer some lessons for LGBT nonprofits to emulate.

“We’re seeing nonprofits diving into their resourceful roots,” said Elizabeth Clawson of the National Council of Nonprofits, a network of state and regional nonprofit associations that serve 20,000 member organizations, which are small and mid-size groups.

“The nonprofit sector more than any other is creative and resourceful because we have to be and have been like that through the entirety of our existence,” she said. “We’re good at finding shortcuts and being creative when we have to, so that bodes well for our survival.”

Clawson, who is straight, said that many member organizations have begun sharing ideas online.

“Members have been very proactive with helping each other find resources,” she said. “They share recommendations for products and services, and share expertise as a network.”

Read the rest of the story:  http://www.washingtonblade.com/2009/3-20/news/national/14244.cfm