I am interested in the Indonesia Presidential elections
because the country’s leader will have to finally recognize the incalculable
value of civil society in creating a safe and happy future for its
citizens. Right now it could give a
rat’s ass.
In Aceh the national government is painted as an “enemy of
Islam” and therefor an enemy of the “freedoms” that Partai Aceh/Probowo are
promising if they win. For some bizarre
reason, the term “NGO” is seen as being synonymous with the government. Would that it were true. Indonesia has an abysmal lack of respect or
understanding of what non-profit and volunteer groups have done, and could
continue to do, for the country. In
comparison with a bureaucracy that seems to be on one long coffee break, small
pockets of community members try to hold it all together, whether it be through
health initiatives, education reform groups, farmers’ rights advocates,
environmentalists, or sustainable livelihoods agencies like JMD—NGOs try to
fill in the enormous gap that Indonesian bureaucracy does not see fit to fill
any time soon. NGO= Non-Governmental Organization.
And yet in his recent trip to Aceh to report on the legislative
elections, journalist Michael Bachelard was harassed by pro-PA supporters
asking him belligerently if he was from an NGO, as if this were the worst sin
one could commit in northern Aceh. Because NGOs are in cahoots with Jakarta, don’t you know. If any of
these pea-brained thugs-for-hire were asked to explain what it was about NGOs
that was so detrimental to Aceh’s way of life, they couldn’t tell you. But you’ve got a government that doesn’t care
whether its employees do their jobs and give services, and a community full of
disenfranchised GAM families spoiling for a fight and promised the world by the
Gerinda party, and there’s no way in the world that any sane Acehnese would
want to work for not much money for a group that actually helps people,
actually loves the land and its natural resources, actually wants boys and
girls to be educated.
Fortunately there are, as in every country, a few
less-than-sane souls who pretty much risk their lives every day for their
neighbors and their communities. These are the people who implement the
programs that provide the materials that train the community to grow and
prosper and begin once again to think and make decisions for itself.
And no one, anywhere, is willing to donate any money or
technical assistance to help these people learn how to best do those things.
There is a May 20 article by Weh
Yeoh currently circulating on several international development websites,
called “5 reasons why
effective marketing and good development work are incompatible.” It has generated a lot of criticism from those in the development field,
as well s those in marketing and social media.
Raising money (Marketing) for an organization or project needs to be
simplistic and catchy, says the article, but in so doing it “dumbs down” the complexity
of the actual work needed to be done.
I’m reprinting the article and link below so you can see the outcry that
this caused, and I was about to jump on the bandwagon, but I started
re-thinking my opinion after this statement by the author:
As long as we have
donor-driven marketing, we cannot have needs-driven development.
Yeoh
devotes a good portion of the article to a trend known as “poverty porn” in
which graphic and disturbing images of an agency’s particular crisis are shown
in an ad as an attempt to horrify people into donating. He uses Save The Children’s recent ad
campaign as an example.
I
understand what he’s saying, but I think both his statement above as well as
the “poverty porn” campaigns are on the right track.
JMD has
received donations for goats, for seeds, for tools to help women farmers. Heifer International lets you adopt a
cow. Save the Children lets you adopt a
child. Food pantries say “feed the
hungry.” Because these are things donors want to do. When they think of kids, and goats, and big dinners,
they feel all warm and fuzzy. They don’t
feel the same way about bookkeepers, electric bills, audits, or management
courses. Yet those things are what is needed by the agencies giving out the
goats and teaching the farmers and providing malaria awareness.
JMD has received practically no administrative support. Funds are mandated by donors to go to direct services and materials. Excessive administrative costs are one thing. But in a province where an appropriate administration is the difference between a thriving NGO community and extinction, attention needs to be focused on an agency's ability to sustainably provide needed materials and services. Needs-driven development for JMD would look
like this: Training for the
administrative and bookkeeping staff in how to network with local and
government agencies, develop and prepare responses to international funding
RFPs, manage grant funds, provide appropriate monitoring and evaluation,
advocate for policy changes on the local and national level, supervise direct
staff appropriately and develop good policies and procedures . . . I could go
on.
JMD is
at a crossroads at the moment because it cannot apply for funding for more
programming unless some agency or group of donors steps up to the plate and
recognizes how crucial good administrative staff and appropriate field staff
training is to the success of any direct project. In a country and province where NGOs are
treated with suspicion, the word “volunteer” is hardly recognizable. These local agencies are the province’s last
best hope—and they have been nearly wiped out.
None of
the $600 million in post-tsunami reconstruction in Aceh ever went to training
local citizens how to be competent and permanent NGOs in the new landscape of
global competition. As a result, there
are practically no local non-profit, non-governmental service of any kind in
Aceh anymore. Donor-driven funding
allowed international NGOs to get the multi-million dollar contracts and
paternalistically “hire” individuals from local groups, gutting those groups
forever and taking the majority of the funding themselves, leaving the
administrative landscape as barren as Aceh’s once-verdant rainforests.
Be
honest: If you were given a choice to
give $200 to either buy a family a lamb, or pay for one month of management
training for the director of the agency that tries to help farmers, which would
you pick?
Save
the Children’s “poverty porn” is more than just a gimmick. The sight of a starving child may be
horrifying . . . but think of how horrifying it is to the child herself, or to
her mother. It is a reality, not a stage set.
Will
there ever be needs-driven development?
As someone who has seen too many special interest projects go belly up
in Aceh, I certainly hope so.
5 reasons why
effective marketing and good development work are incompatible
By Weh Yeoh | Posted in: Ethics in
development, Fundraising,
NGOs,
Poverty,
Social
media | May 20, 2014 |
I
finally watched Kony 2012. From a pure marketing perspective, the video itself
is absolutely flawless. They manage to take a very complex situation, and not
only make the audience understand it, but also care. But herein lies the
problem. Critics of Invisible Children say that Kony 2012’s simple message
of “catch the bad guy” is a distraction from the real issues that exist in
Central African Republic. The message doesn’t reflect the complexity of the
work needed.
Effective
marketing brings attention and donations. Good development work should
improve the lives of poor people. Does the latter limit the ability of good
marketing folk to tell that simple story which the public seeks? Here are the 5
reasons why effective marketing cannot co-exist with effective development
work.
1.
We have short attention spans
Research
shows that when we read web pages, we actually don’t. In fact, we typically
read 28% of the text that
is on a web page.
Similarly, only 12% of readers read all the way to the bottom of a page. (I’ll be
accessing NSA records to check if you make it all the way down in a few
minutes).
Knowing
this, people who work in communications for non-profits boil down the
complexities of the program so that it hardly represents the actual work done.
Then they stick it in the slow cooker for another 12 hours until it is reduced
even further.
In the
push and pull of what needs to be done versus what people consume, clever
communications folk know that they have to cater to the amount of effort that
people are willing to give.
2.
There is no incentive to translate complexity.
Even if
an organisation truly values the work they do, and talks endlessly about how
good this work is to other people in the sector, or even institutional donors
such as government agencies, this matters little to the public.
Think
about selling a product like Coca-Cola. In this transaction, the person buying
the product is also the same person as the one receiving the benefit. In global
development, the people paying and the person receiving the benefit are
completely different. In the case of public donations, the payer is the general
public and the people receiving services or programs are those in poor
countries.
This
creates a power imbalance because the person paying becomes the boss, not
the person receiving benefits. Communication and marketing that oversimplify
the message is another way of pandering to the needs of potential donors.
3.
Even if it offends some, on balance, simple is better
When an
organisation produces some marketing material that is offensive, such as Save
the Children Australia did recently, they are likely to face some kind of backlash. In this case, the use of
starving African children, often referred to as poverty porn, will offend some.
Those in the know will be up in arms over what clearly negative tactics, and
will write in to complain, post about it on social media and so forth.
Save
the Children Australia’s poverty porn, captured by WhyDev’s Brendan Rigby who
posted it to our Twitter account first. Video has since been taken down.
But at
the end of the day, poverty porn and other negative marketing tactics work, at least in the short term.
They raise funds from the public because they tell a simple message about
the “other.”
The
conversation that occurs within organisations is then around the costs versus
benefits of running a campaign that uses poverty porn. And on balance, despite
criticisms which I personally think are valid, those tactics remain. The
prevailing attitude is still that the end justify the means. The proof in the
pudding is that weeks after this backlash, Save the Children Australia were at
it again. Same poverty porn angle, different ad.
4.
Money drives the work, not the need.
I
touched on this earlier, but the vast majority of aid and development still
revolves around what the donor wants to do, not what the people need. The
debate around overheads, which reflects the administrative costs of an
organisation’s work, is an old one within
the development sector,
but knowledge of how irrelevant this metric is for the general public is still
low.
Why?
Because organisations don’t want to talk about it. In fact, if you go to pretty
much any large nonprofit’s website, somewhere, they’ll be boasting about how
low their overheads are.
A large
and internationally recognised non-profit bragging about low overheads. Based
on this, who in the public would think this was irrelevant?
As long as we have donor-driven
marketing, we cannot have needs-driven development.
5.
Effective marketing draws on herd mentality
Interlinked
with the need of nonprofits to focus on fundraising is the realisation that
good marketing is very much infectious. Everybody in nonprofit communications
wants to create that viral piece of campaigning.
charity:
water are great exponents of this. More than 20,000 people have held birthday campaigns to raise funds for
them, simply by sharing their desire to help out through social media and
email. It’s been incredibly effective. charity: water have raised over $27 million in 2012. Not
a bad effort for an organisation with less than 50 staff.
Forgetting
for one moment criticisms about the actual
impact that they make, charity: water are able to leverage off herd mentality
and the bandwagon effect. These social
pressures exist often because we want to be seen as being on the “winner’s side”. If the goal is getting
a campaign to go viral, it’s
not the effectiveness of what the organisation does that matters, it’s how much
other people are sharing the same material.
We all
know the power of communications to drive awareness and as importantly,
donations. But the reality is, unless we change the way we consume
communications as human beings, overly simplistic marketing tactics will always butt heads with
good development work. Don’t agree? Please restore my faith in humanity
and prove me wrong in the comments.
Weh Yeoh
Weh is a disability development worker
currently based in Cambodia. He is a professionally trained physiotherapist who
has completed a MA in Development Studies at the University of NSW. He has a
diverse background, having spent years travelling through remote parts of Asia,
volunteering in an orphanage and adult shelter for people with disabilities in
Vietnam, interning in India, and studying Mandarin in Beijing. He has
experience in the NGO sector both in Australia and internationally in China,
through Handicap International. He is an obsessed barefoot runner, wearer of
Lycra, and eats far too much for his body size. You can view his LinkedIn
(www.linkedin.com/in/wmyeoh) and follow him on Twitter @wmyeoh.
- See more at:
http://www.whydev.org/5-reasons-why-effective-marketing-and-good-development-work-are-incompatible/#sthash.dx2fTRk1.dpuf
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