Nope – no personal stories in communications materials. So what other strategy can work to target potential donors?
I’m insatiably curious. Mostly that’s been an asset for the kind of work I’ve done, but particularly in intercultural relations I am reminded that it’s a trait that can really work against me. The training for working or volunteering with immigrants and refugees emphasizes this: do not ask about their past. At all. Unless they discuss the past, everything is from this moment forward. The more I’ve worked with immigrants and refugees, the more dimensions this has taken on, and the more it begins to make sense. But sometimes I forget.
I was on a seminar in Sweden for a few days with people from countries around the world, but mostly from Europe and North America. Out for lunch one day, I was sitting with a Swedish woman who worked in municipal communications, and a former journalist from Burundi who’d immigrated to Sweden a few years before as an asylum refugee. They had been friends for a couple of years. They were telling me about the asylum refugee approval process in Sweden. I’m forgetting some of the details of this story now, but she said that for something like 95% of the people asking to stay in Sweden as asylum refugeesare sent back for a very long wait while their application is put in queue and their circumstances are evaluated. In almost every single case, that was the process — for 95%. But not for him, she said. He was in the five percent. At his initial asylum-claim interview, he was given asylum status on the spot. We were out for lunch in casual conversation in a casual environment, I was itchily curious, and I couldn’t not scratch it. “How come?” I asked him. “What was it that put you in the five percent?” He became still, looked like his mind was racing for a response, and said very firmly, “I am not obliged to answer that.”
I swore at myself, rolled my eyes internally — how stupid - the experiences he had in Burundi were over that vast chasm. When someone lives in a world so so far removed from horrific acts of war, places where journalism is often a dangerous profession, where corruption is complex, where caution develops as an eighth sense and where justice is iffy, it can be difficult – too impossible – to communicate across that chasm. Plus, where did I get off having any expectation that he’d answer that? Damn. I know better… but it was like the curious part of me was drooling. It was none of my damned business.
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We have this North American openness and willingness to reveal personal information to strangers fairly quickly. That’s our reality, but it’s not the reality for many people. There are lots of people who aren’t comfortable talking about things they feel or personal experience with people they hardly know – not just culturally, or emotionally, or across a chasm where they were forever changed, but also for those who remember there can be real life-and-death dangers in telling the truth to strangers.
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I’m reflecting on this today:
Assume for a moment that personal stories are necessary as part of communications materials in order to make the work of charities or humanitarian organizations real and concrete, in order for fundraising to compel donations, in order for these organizations to help beneficiaries or to give them the money enabling them to help themselves.
What happens if a humanitarian organization needs a campaign to raise massive public donations, but the nature of the personal stories are so awful that those affected can’t tell them or write them or in any way re-live them?
There is no possibility of ‘profiles of people we’ve helped’ stories on their websites or in their publications (not even anonymous profiles), no one available for media interviews (even anonymously), no one who has directly benefited from such important work.
…
Can social marketing offer anything in the way of potential solutions? ‘Social marketing’ takes marketing strategies and formulas usually applied to business and applies them to social challenges, usually in some way trying to affect behaviour change. One aspect is the idea that people have to pay something – cash or other – in order to be invested in a behaviour change initiative, to feel that it has value. For example free malaria nets may be less likely to be used for health prevention than malaria nets that cost something.
So is it possible to in any way apply social marketing to fundraising? Could the target for behaviour change be shifting someone from being a non-donor to being a donor? Could ’social marketing’ apply if the exchange is for the individual to receive compelling, deeply-moving stories of transformed lives, a break from the flatline routine of their daily lives, and a hormone boost from altruism… in exchange for giving a donation? Could it be a social marketing campaign if the target was perhaps identified as upper middle-class 30 to 60 year-old Lower Mainland residents who annually donate $200 and up to humanitarian causes, in which case the ‘behaviour change’ if it could be called that would be asking them to shift their philanthropy, or to give as well to this new agency?
I’m no expert on social marketing by any means, just find what I know of it to be fascinating, very chewy. Nedra Weinreich and Craig Lefebvre are people I do consider to be experts on this and from whom I learned a great deal by reading their blogs and following discussions on great knowledge-sharing social marketing listserv. I think that they would be able to correct me on these fuzzy areas above, and that they would likely have some really interesting perspectives – lightbulbs going on in a dim room.
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Tonight I’m going to a house dinner that will raise some small funds for a Lower Mainland agency that most people are surprised exists here, called VAST – Vancouver Association for Survivors of Torture. I’ve never done work with them or even met them, but I’ve been interested in them for many years and I know they are very minimally-funded and are very very under-resourced in providing support and counselling for the very many asylum refugees who arrive in Canada and try to somehow resolve incomprehensible experiences and find a way to step forward in relative isolation. I’m thinking I’ll ask how much bigger the demand for post-torture counselling is than the supply right here in the Lower Mainland. I want to learn how they approach communication for fundraising.
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Back again to the dilemma of creating communication campaigns where there is no option of finding and telling the personal stories of those helped by an agency.
This is my big question I am mulling today:
If telling personal stories – of a few people whose lives have improved because of a charity’s work – is not possible, what other fundraising strategies could work to raise funds? Also, what other fundraising strategies (besides telling the personal stories of people affected) have been proven effective? Or forget ‘proven effective’, and go blue sky – crowdsourced brainstorming – How can a humanitarian NGO raise awareness of their organization, reach out to potential donors and raise funds when it is not possible to know the specific personal stories of the people who benefit from the service?
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I know there’s supposed to be a blogger accountability standard that you never edit a post only add to it, but I’ve never really felt that I buy that. Anyway, I’ll likely drop in and edit this post-post, do links to the literature if I feel inspired. I won’t change anything that says I believe X to I believe Y.
I would be interested in other ideas and perspectives and philosophies and marketing strategy thoughts and development communication considerations and input on related studies/evidence and just plain brainstorming.
It’s filled with chewiness.
I had an interesting conversation today with a hotel manager who says it seems that everyone calling for information about meeting spaces now wants to know what the hotel offers in the way of ‘green meeting rooms’. With the increased interest in corporate social responsibility and corporate social accountability reports, he said that’s increasingly what their big-dollar corporate customers want. As a result, his hotel is exploring what they can do or what they can purchase that other hotels don’t offer so they can position themselves as greener, market themselves that way — and get more meeting and ballroom bookings.
The business case to shift hotels to greener practices is pretty strong. This interesting PowerPoint by Cascadia Consulting Group advises hotel managers to find what it calls the ‘green sweet spot’, but also warns that the hazards of greenwashing aren’t to be ignored.
What meeting planners are beginning to tell this hotel manager is that they want ‘carbon-neutral meetings’. There’s only so much they as a hotel could do for that he points out, because if the companies have people flying in to a city for the meeting, any airline offsets they have to take care of and ensure on their own. I asked if his hotel does (or is considering doing) any carbon offsetting. Though they haven’t, he said the demand for carbon-neutral meetings means that perhaps this is an area that they should begin to explore.
In Connecticut, one smart green meetings company has partnered with a carbon offsetter, and offers carbon offsetting for meetings prominently on their website. And not just meetings — a hotel at Heathrow is billing itself as ‘the first hotel company worldwide to offer all guests carbon offsetting possibilities’. InterContinental Hong Kong aims to be ‘one of the leading venues of carbon neutral meetings and events’. A Sydney company tries to address the ‘Green?! You guys all got on a plane and flew here!’ question by including info & a calculator to offset flights:
‘Be assured all Mercure Meetings are carbon neutral. / You now have the option to pay to offset the carbon produced from your flights to and from the meeting. Here is the link to our Carbon Offset Calculator where you can offset your flights.’
Hotel managers are asking, ‘how can we claim this green niche over our competitors, claim with accuracy that our meeting rooms are carbon-neutral, market that heavily, and tap into corporations currently very hungry to show corporate environmental responsibility?’
In Vancouver, the Hyatt hotel has recently launched what’s essentially an investment to get that business.
Yesterday, Bullfrog Power put out a press release saying that the Hyatt Regency Vancouver ‘now supports renewable electricity with Bullfrog Power’:
All of Hyatt Regency Vancouver’s meeting rooms are now ‘bullfrogpowered™’ with wind power from the Bear Mountain wind farm just outside of Dawson Creek (‘the first renewable energy project in B.C. to deliver EcoLogoM-certified wind power to the regional grid). Hyatt Regency Vancouver joins its sister property, Hyatt Regency Calgary, which began bullfrogpowering its meeting space, gym and pool area in September 2008.
The grid below (from the Bullfrog website) shows the shift – the marketing and PR rep’s for the Hyatt can say ‘book our meeting rooms – we have shifted our power source for all electricity, heat, etc. from the left column in the grid over to the right column’. It’s interesting, as a side-note, that they don’t break down the sources of ‘Other hydro’ (listed in the left column) – I would have thought that doing so would make Bullfrog (right column) stand out even more as the good-guy alternative.
At the Hyatt, there’s no windmill on the roof. How it works is that Bullfrog Power injects their (clean, emissions-free EcoLogoM-certified) electricity onto the B.C. electricity grid to match the amount of power used in all of Hyatt’s meeting spaces. The Hyatt pays their normal costs to BC Hydro, and pays another chunk to Bullfrog Power.
Today, a Google search only comes up with 1,900 results for “carbon neutral meetings”. I’m guessing we’ll see that skyrocket.
Photo by Lincolnian
I want to write a piece about CEO cyclists. Well, they don’t really have to be CEOs … but people who you wouldn’t necessarily expect to commute by bike. Not the leaders of green technology companies. Not those who’ve been involved in cycling advocacy, or are known in the bicycle or transportation policy worlds.
Commuting by bike is definitely unusual among their work colleagues.
I’d like to write a profile where I interview 8-10 people who commute to work by bike, and who work in environments where this is definitely the exception.
They might not wear gear that says I am a cyclist. They might not have shower and changing facilities and company-financed secure bike parking. But they might.
Do you have any ideas?
Who should I talk to?
Photo by jaymiek
