All posts in category Aid Marketing

Public Service Announcement: Regarding Humanity

It’s been a while, I know. For the two or three of you who check in here, from time to time, I can assure you, no–this blog’s not dead. Just in a bit of a coma. Or maybe hungover. I’ve been busy.

But I’ll break my busy schedule to bring you all this public service announcement: There is an excellent new site up that you all need to know about.

Regarding Humanity

A whole repository of links, sub-sites, commentary and analyses dedicated to one of the most important and also rant-worthy subjects in all of aid: Poverty P0rn.

intro_final

That got your attention, didn’t it?

What is poverty p0rn, and what isn’t? How do we tell the difference? What’s so bad about poverty p0rn, anyway? How to we make sure that we don’t do it? And what happens if we do? How do we, practitioners, explain it to non-practitioners? Leaving aside the attention-grabbing term “poverty p0rn”, it’s probably more accurate to say: Regarding Humanity is a space for advanced discussion and commentary on issues around the ethics of representation of international relief and development–practice, practitioners, and recipients–in popular culture.

From the About page:

Regarding Humanity is produced by a group of professionals whose experience spans humanitarian aid, transmedia storytelling, journalism, service design, academia, ethnography, visual art, and mobile technology.

All of us have faced the challenge of representing communities in our work. We recognize that the questions are many and complex, and that there is a need for a public discussion about ethical representation to shift the focus from aid to agency.

We strive for a diversity of voices and perspectives from our partners in both Western and developing world contexts.

 

Take the time to bookmark and regularly check in with Regarding Humanity.

You can follow Regarding Humanity on Twitter.

 

 

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by J. on May 22, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Aid Blogging, Aid Marketing
Tagged , , ,

Posted by J. on May 22, 2013

http://aidspeak.wordpress.com/2013/05/22/public-service-announcement-regarding-humanity/

Purity

I’ll be vulnerable and confess up front that I really, really dislike professional sports.

I won’t belabor the point, except to say that I see as plain immoral the amount of money being paid to someone for something no more meaningful than being really good a tossing a ball through a basket while people in the same city go hungry and queue up to apply for minimum wage jobs.

Or the amount of money being paid to someone for riding a bicycle really well.

It was pretty hard to miss the drama around Lance Armstrong’s fall from public grace last week. In the end it was precipitous and sweeping. Stripped of past trophies, all but forced to resign from a cancer charity that he started, loss of title. Even the very real possibility that he’ll have to pay back actual cash earned through winnings and endorsements. Not to mention an internet full of emotive angst and moral outrage among faithful fans who expected better of him.

I find very curious the lengths to which particularly American audiences will go to insist on “purity” in professional sports. If find it curious that this supposed purity matters in the context of an industry so full of insider backstabbing, egoism, scandal, abuses of all kinds and just plain drama. But that notion of purity is important.

We allow our impression of an athlete or a sport or a team to be tainted by irrelevant things, while at the same time constructing for ourselves illogical narratives which reinforce the messaging coming out of sports industry PR machines. We believe in this notion of purity in professional sport in the face of repeated evidence to the contrary quite simply because we want it to be true. We need to cling to the belief professional baseball or hockey remains pure – that athletes really do what they do without performance enhancing substances.

For rock ‘n’ roll stars, drug use is de rigueur. Maybe if Lance had been a guitarist instead of a cyclist…

he should have just been a rock star

I think there’s a wake up call in here for humanitarian NGOs. We need to see this as a wake-up call about what happens when public perception goes up in flames

There is no point in denying that there are competing narratives about what is “real” in the world of international relief and development and philanthropy. Without banging on about which parts of which narratives I personally think are really real, I’ll simply say that we will someday come to the point beyond which it will be no longer possible to separate those competing narratives. There will come a time when our constituents will collectively demand an explanation for why we said one thing and did something else. And if we’re to really learn the lesson of Lance Armstrong, we need to understand that it will be very public and very much into the weeds of detail. We’ve seen what happens when someone the public thought was “pure” turns out not to be.

And in the end it will not matter whether so-called “purity” makes any sense in the real world or not. In the end we’ll be stripped of our awards and our credentials, forced to pay back donors, not because we didn’t do good work, not because we can’t show impact. Remember, Lance won a lot of races; the drugs very clearly worked for him. No, this will all happen because we allowed and in some cases enabled people to create a narrative about who we are and what we do that does not align with reality.

Possibly related:

7 Comments
by J. on October 29, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Aid, Aid Industry, Aid Marketing
Tagged , , , , , ,

Posted by J. on October 29, 2012

http://aidspeak.wordpress.com/2012/10/29/purity/

What does it mean when beneficiaries sell relief goods?

We see it in almost every relief response: those life-saving NFI kits, food parcels (I don’t know why we insist on calling them “food baskets”), tarpaulins, jerry-cans, shoes, or whatever else… that we’d gone to a lot of trouble to distribute directly to refugees or survivors end up for sale in local markets.

We usually just take this for granted as one of those things that always seems to happen. In some cases (Tsunamiland and Haiti come to mind) we used the appearance of relief materiel in local markets as a crude proxy to tell us, “okay, we’ve distributed enough of _______.” But other than this and sometimes post-distribution monitoring (which typically looks at the absorption/resale on one specific thing, as opposed to the overall issue of resale), as far as I know, the phenomenon of beneficiaries monetizing (selling) relief goods/food has never been looked at in any kind of systematic way.

Both Fiona Terry (Condemned to Repeat) and Linda Polman (Crisis Caravan) discuss the issue of relief supplies ending up in local markets generally as a bad thing. And fair enough, I suppose, given that they’re talking primarily about situations where those relief items including food are either diverted before ever being distributed or confiscated from beneficiaries soon after distribution. While on one hand a certain amount of relief stuff ending up in the host economy is probably inevitable, and I have yet to meet a relief op of any size that had zero per cent inventory slippage. However, on the other it is our responsibility as humanitarians to do all we can to ensure that the stuff we give out is, first, the right stuff, and second, that it ends up in the hands of those for whom it is intended.

Plumpy’nut for sale in a relief zone near you (photo by J.)

Even so I’d see this as rather different from the phenomenon of beneficiaries who receive distribution and then under no apparent duress sell it. What does it mean when we see this happening?  Obviously there are many variables to consider, but here is part of what I think we need to be thinking:

More than anything else, we have to get past the simplistic explanations. Monetization of relief goods by beneficiaries isn’t necessarily a negative, but we need to watch it specifically, watch for it, and understand what it means in each context. We have to dig deeper than just, “well, there’s obviously something they want more…” We have to look more closely at the actual behavior, at what they’re selling, and what they’re buying with the proceeds. We need to systematically monitor and track and analyse monetization of relief goods. For starters, we need to look at/for two primary patterns (there are probably more):

1) Selling to buy something similar. They’re selling clothes to buy different clothes, food to buy different food. If we see this it means that we’re basically on the right path in assessing real beneficiary needs, but we probably need to look carefully at what’s driving us to distribute what we’re distributing rather than what they’re trading for. If we distribute wheat flour which they immediately sell in order to buy pasta, for example, then we need to ask ourselves the obvious question: why not just distribute pasta? (And if the answer to that is something about institutional needs or donor priorities, then we should probably be asking ourselves some deeper questions about why we’re there in the first place…)

2) Selling to buy something totally different. They’re selling the Plumpy’nut and buying SIM cards, or they’re selling the medium sized pot from the family kit and buying bednets. This is actually the larger, deeper problem. It is a signal that something is seriously flawed in either the logic of our selected intervention(s) or in the quality of our delivery. If we see this it means that at best we’re running a high cost, low impact cash-transfer program (more or less what distribution of TOMS shoes seems to have become in Haiti).

While monetization of relief goods doesn’t have to be a bad thing in every context, we should not let it become the norm. If we find it becoming our operative assumption that beneficiaries will sell what we distribute, then we need to be asking ourselves some hard questions about why we’re doing what we’re doing. We need to be reviewing the quality of our assessments, rechecking the validity of our analyses, checking the logic of our intervention. We also looking carefully at livelihoods options, cash transfer or voucher distribution and justifying our decisions to keep distributing.

5 Comments
by J. on June 21, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Aid, Aid Industry, Aid Marketing, Best Practice, Emergency Relief
Tagged , , , , , ,

Posted by J. on June 21, 2012

http://aidspeak.wordpress.com/2012/06/21/what-does-it-mean-when-beneficiaries-sell-relief-goods/

Meaningless Fractions

This is a guest post by AidSource member Fredrick – he’s not an aid worker himself, but rather the partner of an aid worker, and so offers an interesting perspective on our world. Fredrick has written for us before in the Work & Life section of AidSource.

Today he shares his thoughts, as a true expert, on the meaningless fractions that aid agencies like to use in their marketing and publicity materials.

* * * * *

Aid Agencies and Meaningless Fractions

Since becoming a partner of an emergency aid worker I have spent quite a lot of time learning about the different organisations. This entails looking at their web sites. You learn a bit from this. One of the things is that they seem to compete over who spends the largest fraction on humanitarian activities, programs or whatever they call it. So CARE is happy to report that more than 91% all resources go directly to programs. Save The Children, for example, use 90% of all expenditures on program services. Oxfam UK reports 83% used on aid, development and campaigning. Medecins Sans Frontieres is happy to report that they use more than 80% on direct humanitarian services. Oxfam America, clearly the laggard, uses slightly less than 80% on program services.

All these NGOs report that the rest is used on administration and fund raising. The main point it seems is to demonstrate that the fraction of income spent on administration is low and this should somehow be indicative of the agencies’ efficiency.

I happen to be a bit of an expert on efficiency and the measurement of productivity, so I know what numbers are important and what numbers are not. And the fractions happily reported by all these aid agencies are totally meaningless as indicators of anything beyond their definition. What any person who knows a little bit about productivity measurements will tell you is that you have to relate the amount of outputs to inputs. The numbers reported by aid agencies relate, in a manner that is quite arbitrary, the fraction of costs of a particular input to total cost of inputs. It is like a farmer bragging about using as much as 90% of the total of cost running a farm on fertilizer and only 10% on seeds. Who cares? What you should care about is how much the farmer produces for a given cost.

This really had me stumped. So I asked a few people who work for aid agencies about why these numbers are reported and if they thought that they carried any valuable information.

The answers were quite depressing. The numbers were acknowledged to be meaningless. But it looks good for potential donors that a large fraction of their money isn’t “wasted” on administration, so the numbers are basically reproduced for marketing purposes. Whether aid agencies know that these numbers are meaningless and just report them in order to fool donors or they actually think that these numbers is a measure of efficiency I have no idea and I really don’t care. Corporations fib in their advertising all the time and are often clueless about what they are doing and there is no reason why professional aid agencies should be different. But the question is whether this practice does any harm. I believe it does.

Administrative support is an input like any other.

If aid agencies compete over making this cost as low as possible relative to total costs, it does not take a genius to see that this can result in too little support from an understaffed and underpaid head office. Further, the practice provides incentive to transfer tasks better executed centrally to individual programs.

I’ll provide what I think is an example. Many aid agencies have a group of experienced aid workers employed centrally. These aid workers are supposed to be first responders or augment local staff in programs when programs must be rapidly scaled up, i.e. in extraordinary situations (like disasters). I have been told that there has been a shift in how these employees are treated. Where they previously were given substantial breathers when they we’re not needed, they are now sent to work for programs on tasks of a much less critical nature. I have no proof of intention, but one effect is that these workers spend longer periods being paid for by programs and less time being paid for by the head office. Thereby they shave a couple of percentage decimals of what is considered administrative costs and inflate the fraction of costs that is charged to programs.

Great! Mission accomplished for some clever accountant somewhere. This does however mean that these aid workers get less time for recovery and professional development, which will surely diminish their efficiency over time or induce them to find a different job.

To be fair, it is possible that better measures are hard to compute, possibly for lack of resources. Also, it is possible that these numbers, although in themselves meaningless, send a signal about the frugality of the aid agencies. Even if this is true, it does not validate the use of measures with no informational value. It is a very general rule that if you establish silly criteria for success you get suboptimal outcomes. On top of this, it is a dubious strategy to base your marketing on the stupidity of you donors. At some point they will catch on and you end up looking silly.

5 Comments
by aidsource on May 22, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Aid, Aid Industry, Aid Marketing
Tagged , , ,

Posted by aidsource on May 22, 2012

http://aidspeak.wordpress.com/2012/05/22/meaningless-fractions-guest-post/

Times, they are a-changin’

There’s a good chance that unless you’ve been intentionally following what has come to be affectionately known in some circles as Three-Cups-of-Tea-gate, you missed this update on the KPLU website (KPLU is a local NPR affiliate based in Seattle, WA):

‘Three Cups of Tea’ and ‘deceit’ has international aid in hot spotlight.

It’s not a long article, but for those not motivated to click the link and read all of it, basically it is a short update on the status of the civil lawsuit being brought against Greg Mortenson, his co-author David Relin, the Penguin Group, and the Central Asia Institute. The language of the accusation is particularly telling: the defendants (Mortenson, Relin, Penguin and CAI) are being accused of fraud and racketeering.  At the same time the States Attorney for the state of Montana is pursuing a full investigation of the Central Asia Institute to see whether it broke state laws which govern the actions of non-profit organizations there.

Much is made in the article of the similarities between Mortenson and James Frey who was convicted of fraud and forced to pay reparations after admitting on the Oprah Winfrey show that he’d lied in what was marketed as his memoir, A Million Little Pieces. And predictably, Mortenson’s attorneys want the civil suit against him thrown out because,

“Plaintiffs should not be allowed to create a world where authors are exposed to the debilitating expense of class action litigation just because someone believes a book contains inaccuracies,”

I’m no attorney myself and so cannot really have more than a layperson’s perspective on the legalities at play here. But it seems to me that this is both representative of a now almost complete shift in public perception of aid organizations and aid workers, and also a portent of tougher times headed for the aid industry. Regardless of one’s personal perspective on Greg Mortenson and Three Cups of Tea and the Central Asia Institute, and even if this particular lawsuit is lost, we are now living in a time when donors can and will take us to court if they can make the case that we painted a picture in our marketing and PR which did not convey reality.

Those of you who work for an NGO that markets or fundraises in the United States, take a close look at your employer’s fundraising material and ask yourself how it makes you feel, knowing what you know about the real world of implementing humanitarian relief and development in the field. I don’t mean to say that the house of cards will come crashing down tomorrow. But the sea has changed.

We’re working in a strange, new time.

4 Comments
by J. on February 13, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Aid, Aid Marketing
Tagged , , , , , , ,

Posted by J. on February 13, 2012

http://aidspeak.wordpress.com/2012/02/13/times-they-are-a-changin/

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