Perfect Example

Your Working Girl has been poking around for a Perfect Example of how a campaign to promote social change is different from a commercial advertising campaign – something to help with the old selling socks versus selling social change debate – and, as so often happens, while thinking about something else entirely, Perfect Example tapped her on the shoulder to insist on having her say.  The case in point is the story of Albina Guarnieri, the salary-capping, charity-hater’s sponsorship of Bill C-470 and Your Working Girl’s effort to stop it.    

Being a Gentle Reader, you understand how upsetting this private-member’s debacle was to Your Working Girl.  Not only did she bear witness to political parties of all stripes jostling to be first in line to take a whack at charities by pandering to misinformed populist sentiment, but she heard all too clearly the deafening silence coming from the people who charge membership fees to advocate on our behalf.   Once more into the breach, dear friends . . .

. . . .In peace there's nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger . . . . .

Fortunately, in addition to her fictional buddy, Henry V, Your Working Girl has real, live friends, many of whom are very smart people, and one Gentleman of her Acquaintance, dear Steve Falk (who is also taking a break from the hurly-burly world of a day job to think about a suitable situation to see him through his golden years) called her up on November 8^th, the day before Ms Guarnieri was to be interviewed on Rita Celli’s CBC Radio Show Ontario Today and said, “Do you think we could throw up a website responding to the issues so we can publicize it on that show tomorrow?”   I said “sure.”  Steve, being a man of means, said “okay, I’ll buy the URL.”  Thus, www.NoToBillC470.com was born with NoToBillC470@twitter.com and notobillc470@gmail.com coming along for the ride. 

Using an online template, we wrote the site that evening over the telephone (Six Reasons to Oppose Bill C-470), pulled together existing information on the bill, emailed our friends and loved ones, and launched it the following day.  So people could do something our target audience would hear, we created an “AFP Action Campaign” to put pressure on AFP and “How did your MP vote campaign?” to let MPs know someone was listening.  To round out the strategy Your Working Girl wrote a column under her maiden name on Charity Village’s great new feature called The Podium.   

What happened?

NoToBillC470.com generated traffic from all the right places including a high percentage from Parliamentary URLs, Imagine Canada did some good interviews, AFP Toronto got an earful and MPs got a lot of emails.

Then on November 24^th, AFP Toronto launched internet-based grassroots tool to allow their members to contact and educate their Members of Parliament and Senators about Bill C-470.

And on December 6^th, Jane Taber reported in the Globe and Mail, that Ms Guarnieri  dropped the cap provision from her bill.

So, I asked Perfect Example, besides that, what made you perfect? 

The ever-growing number of self-appointed Don Drapers might disagree, but Perfect Example insists that NoToBillC470 didn’t create a need or a brand.  It provided a vehicle to respond to an existing need for information and action.   And that’s what charities can bear in mind. They do not exist to create a need or become a brand.  They are the vehicle for people who care about an issue to respond.    The need comes first, not the charity, not the brand.  As Perfect Example says, it’s the “not-for” in “not-for-profit”. 

Calling all Cars

Your Working Girl was clearly dreaming when she imagined this blog a forum for her own thoughtful musings while she took a break from the hurly-burly world of a day job to think about a suitable situation to see her through her golden years.   The charitable world has been, uncooperatively, hurling and burling all around her and is now careening off in such a catastrophic direction that she must raise a hand in gentle protest.    

The catastrophe, Bill C-470, a private member’s missile aimed squarely at whatever shred of dignity and independence the charitable sector has left requires, among other things, that a charity be de-registered if it pays an employee more than $250,000 in a single year. 
Your Working Girl has always believed in a strong central government cheerfully seeing to the common good, but a salary cap anywhere other than major league sports seems a tad excessive, even to her not-so-libertarian self. 

The brainchild of the Otherwise Admirable Albina Guarnieri, Bill C-470 is a shockingly naïve and pandering piece of legislative folly that personifies of the poverty of debate surrounding the charitable sector in this country. Does a cherished donor really need a Charity Measures Act to protect her from the causes she chooses to support? 

And what kind of climate are Canadian charities operating in when Liberal finance critic, John McCallum, said C-470 would help to “restore credibility in the charity business.”  Restore credibility? Has Lady Charity fallen so far from grace that a politician is seeking to restore her credibility?  And can you please tell me how Lady Charity’s friends at Imagine Canada and AFP have rallied to her defense? (Hint:  Should the character of Your Working Girl be impugned in such a way, she would not content herself with writing letters, FAQs and talking points.  She would understand, even with her considerable ability to persuade, that the situation called for more than well-reasoned argument.)

Just like the Ontario Medical Association has done with their latest series of feel-good ads:  Your Life is our Life’s Work  or Ontario pharmacies have responded to the McGuinty government’s dispensary fees cuts by mounting the Stopcuts campaign. You must, and Gentle Reader, I know you know this, mount a campaign to influence public opinion.  Take your case to the street.  Talk to people.  Tell your side of the story.   Put up your dukes for goodness sake.

That Ms Guarnieri’s own churlish defense of the bill on www.albinaguarnieri.com is largely driven by the indefatigable Dan Pallotta’s valiant (and solitary) attempt at opposing the legislation is a stark reminder of the ineffectual communications coming from our side. 

And the failure of AFP and Imagine Canada to invest in a public campaign that could potentially stop this legislation and restore some sanity (Thank you Jon Stewart) to the charitable world is a stinging metaphor for how charities that do not invest in fundraising and communications end up not able to control their own destinies. 

“Hey, hey, hey, hold your horses there Your Working Girl, that’s just not fair,” AFP, Imagine Canada or any number of charities who spend their working days playing it safe might whine, “Where are we going to get the money for that kind of campaign? Who’s going to do it?  Television ads cost a lot.  And to set up online, that’s expensive too!”

To which she has one deserved and withering reply:  You’re fundraisers, aren’t you?

Your Working Girl Confesses

When Your Working Girl awoke to the CBC investigative report (Charities paid $762 million to external fundraisers) and heard her very own life’s work referred to as that of a “hired gun out for a share of a donor’s wallet” like it was a bad thing, she retreated to her fainting couch.  Admonishments continued to bleat from the radio:  “More than 80% of the donor’s dollar went to pay fundraisers”, “What we have now is an arms race among charities”, and “beware the high cost of fundraising!”  Oh my. 

Having sufficiently recovered, and emboldened by AFP’s and Imagine Canada’s strongly-worded statements in response to the news reports, I want to share with you, my Gentle and Understanding Reader, another perspective.   

I confess.  When I held savagely beaten women and traumatized children in my arms at the shelter 20 years ago, my heart broke at the violence to which I was bearing witness.   Help was clearly needed, of that there was no question. But my first thought was not how I might summon that help for 15 cents on the dollar.  I was, given the seriousness of the situation, forced to think about how we could be most effective, immediately and in the long term.  I have previously written in this space about the work we were able to do at the shelter because of direct mail supporters.  (If you’d like a refresher, see my very first blog, Staging the Revolution).    But there is one thing I haven’t said and I want to be very clear about it today. 

If we had held ourselves to the ‘common standard’ around the ‘cost of fundraising’, we would not have invested in the fundraising techniques that allowed us to provide life-saving shelter for hundreds of women.   And what does it mean when a shelter turns away women whose husbands are beating them?  Not to put too fine a point on it:  dead women and sometimes dead women and children. 

That the cost to raise a dollar passes for the primary criteria in evaluating a ‘good’ charity these days is not only sad, it’s dangerous.  Sad because for a sector that is a bigger percentage of the GDP than the auto industry, the analysis of it is shockingly shallow.  Dangerous because we have boards of directors throughout the country not making the investment necessary to reach out to the new supporters that will enable them to reduce their waiting lists, connect with more young people who need help, give our elderly dignity and comfort in their last years, and prevent preventable diseases. They are so afraid of being judged as one of those charities they talk about on the TV, it renders them immobile.   Instead of seeing themselves as agents of change, they see themselves as stewards of the donor dollar.  That’s a big difference that plays itself out in so many ways.   Do you want change or more of the same?  

So, what is an unbeaten woman worth? What’s the value of a homeless teenager who doesn’t get infected with HIV/AIDS?  A child who is not obese because of healthy lunch programs?  A case of diabetes not contracted? 

Your Working Girl’s inherent modesty prevents her from saying she can answer these questions alone.  But she does have one thing to say to those who critique the philanthropic sector, her life’s work and the life’s work of many of her friends, and who do not include actual effectiveness of a charity in their critique:  Just Stop It. 

Next:  Who died and made you king?  Critiquing the critics.

Don't try this at home, we're the professionals.

Gentle Reader,

Adopting the mantel of an activist Mary Poppins, I and my umbrella descended onto the fertile soil of Canadian social change.  By 1992, my carpet was bag full of all the campaign accoutrements I could ever imagine needing:  a secret weapon to raise millions of dollars by mail, kitchen-tested campaign strategies suitable for every occasion and the key to delivering a resonant message.  A spoonful of sugar indeed.  

Where would the winds of change carry me?   Which cause would I take up?  What responsive chord would I strike?  Whose disenfranchised voice would I amplify?   As a mercenary for good, I cast hopeful eyes around for my next campaign.  My heart silently cried out the words that dear Emma Lazarus wrote in 1883 and that adorn Lady Liberty herself: 

"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Fortuna answered my fevered prayer by dropping me, without ceremony, into the Charlottetown Accord referendum of 1992 with a passionate clarion call:    "Do you agree that the Constitution of Canada should be renewed on the basis of the agreement reached on August 28, 1992?"

NAC and Judy Rebick, along with Preston Manning of the Reform party and Parti Quebecois leader, Jacques Parizeau, took the No side.  Everyone else took the Yes side.  And I understood for the first time what it meant to be in a pitched battle with the national media listenng to your leader’s every word – and not liking it one bit. A lot of very important people were very angry at NAC during this debate.  Things got down and dirty.

Judy, who was now speaking all over the country, and I spoke on the phone every night trying to figure out how to stay on message or really just how to stay standing.  It was like trying to hold your ground in a 100km wind.  I played every note I knew. And Judy, who was very quick on her feet, occasionally made the No side make sense.  Then Judy was invited to debate NDP leader, Audrey McLaughlin, on national television.  Two women:  one yes, one no in a fight to the finish.   They both wanted to do it and I just  cringed at the prospect. A Rebick-McLaughlin catfight on national television would have NAC and NDP opponents smacking their lips in glee as two high profile Canadian ‘leftie’ women made ugly.    Only a phone call between me and Audrey’s communications director at the time (who also happens to be godfather of my son) prevented that image from scorching our brains.  Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!  

Footnote #1:  The No side won – 54% - 46%.   Did any huddled masses breathe easier?  The answer to that would also be a No. 

Footnote #2:  Wikipedia’s entry on NAC states that “NAC received much of its funding from the federal government until cuts by the Brian Mulroney government in the wake of NAC's opposition to the Charlottetown Accord forced the organization to lay off its staff and cut its budget.”  Ouch.

The Genius of Manhattan

I have always been susceptible to hero worship but by the time I heard of Tony Schwartz, he had already been canonized by many of the American political professionals I had come to know and admire through Campaigns and Elections Seminars in Washington, DC – seminars that included “How to Knife your Opposition in the Back”, “Running a Woman Candidate:  A How-to”, “Damage Control:  Once it’s too late, now what?” and “Interviewing with Authority:  Practical Tips on Controlling the Situation”. 

Schwartz changed political communications and advertising forever when he created what is still considered to be the most effective political ad in history, the “daisy ad” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExjDzDsgbww&feature=fvst) produced for Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1964 Johnson/Goldwater presidential race.  He was the first adman to use the voices of real children instead of adult actors mimicking children.  He went on to create dozens of ads for politicians including Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, and created thousands more for commercial clients. 

Schwartz’s 1972 book, The Responsive Chord broke new ground in media. His idea was that effective communications doesn’t ‘drive home’ a message, but through words, images or especially sounds, it arouses something already existing in the recipient – a thought, an emotion, a memory.  (Schwartz spent a lifetime recording the sounds of Manhattan.)

This, Gentle Reader, was an idea I found so nuanced, so lovely and so powerful, it has affected everything I have done since.

At Interval House, I learned that to be a successful counselor, you must begin ‘where the woman is at’.  As a direct mail fundraiser, I learned to write to the reader in a personal way:  to speak to her about what matters to her. As a communications specialist, I learned from Tony Schwartz that you must awaken something in the person you are trying to reach not try to drive it home or get it across. 

And that feels so much better now doesn’t it, Gentle Reader? 

Another remembrance

I heard Tony Schwartz speak in 2001 when he was receiving an award from Campaigns and Elections.  Five hundred political professionals representing organizations as diverse as the NRA, the Miami Dade Police Union, NOW and AARP sat in a Washington, D.C. ballroom in rapt attention, their eyes misty with reverence as Schwartz accepted his award – by telephone from Manhattan.  His life-long agoraphobia rendered him house-bound.  His physical distance from us in no way diminished his delivery.  Schwartz passed away in June, 2008.  He was 84.  

Learn to strike your own responsive chord at  www.tonyschwartz.org. 

Rattle Those Pots and Pans

In addition to my becoming an independent consultant to the Canadian women’s movement in 1990[1], I decided in that year to boycott men’s fiction. When one makes the political personal, all kinds of sacrifice must be borne.  I made do.  As long as the Male Writer stuck to non-fiction, I remained a Gentle Reader.  But when they assumed a women’s voice my cold heart turned to stone. Sure I missed out on John Updike’s Rabbit series and Roth’s Zuckerman books.  Taking solace in Mary Stewart’s The Wicked Day, Alice Walker’s The Colour Purple and Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees, I retained my equilibrium.  Like giving up chewing gum for Lent, it wasn’t a big sacrifice.  

The women’s movement was the crucible for social change in 1990 (in more than just fiction).  The case against Henry Morgentaler had been struck down by the Supreme Court in 1988.  In 1989, the Court ruled that a woman’s male partner didn’t have equal say in whether a woman could have an abortion.  Yet, funding for women’s shelters was practically non-existent, daycare was a crap shoot and the rape shield law which prevented women from being cross-examined on their sexual history during a rape trial was still two years away. 

I was sitting in a café with Sue Birge, then a National Action Committee on the Status of Women (NAC) staff person, going over the concept for a fundraising mailing.  The envelope was bright red and the tagline declared  “I’m so angry I could scream . . .!”  The women at the next table leaned over to say, ‘you got that right.’  Response to the mailing was heroic and we raised lots of money.  That’s how it was then.  Women were really ticked off about a lot of things and they wanted to do something about it. 

NAC received about $1 million a year from the Secretary of State Women’s Program, but we knew it was coming to an end.  Ensuring 5,000 angry women would show up on Parliament Hill once a year to take aim at Tory, and later, Reform policies didn’t seem to be worth the agro factor for the Liberals anymore (although it was fun to see Preston Manning go apoplectic once a year at the very thought of the federal government funding a women’s organization that did nothing but complain). 

I was right where I wanted to be, in the middle of the action, working as a consultant with NAC.  Judy Rebick had just become president.  She had already become a bit of a household name – having saved Dr. Morgentaler from an anti-abortion activist wielding garden shears outside his clinic on

Harbord Street

. 

Judy was smart, funny and politically savvy.  NAC could be very successful with her at the helm I thought.  The time was right for a strong woman leader.

 “I suppose you’ve got all kinds of people advising you on your communications. ” I said to her at dinner one night, deciding to press my case.

“No.  I don’t,” replied Judy.

“Really?” 

Next:  The Genius of Manhattan

---

[1] In 1990, The Bourne Ultimatum by Robert Ludlum was the sixth bestselling book of fiction, Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child by John Bradshaw was number six in non-fiction, Mariah Carey won the Grammy for Best New Artist, Time magazine named George H.W. Bush Person of the Year (formerly Man of the Year).   Nelson Mandela was released from prison.  The Oka Crisis consumed us during the late summer and fall.

The Men Behind the Revolution

If it is true, as it is so often and tiresomely repeated that “behind every good man is a good woman” and assuming the reverse is also true, then I, as a good woman, confess to having had not one, but four, good men behind me – my own secret John, Paul, George and Ringo.  That I didn’t know them all personally is beside the point.  As a mercenary for good, one must get past such nuance.  

Looking back, I can’t tell you which man I met first, but my memory lands on Jerry Huntsinger.  He wrote his letters so personally, I felt like I had known him all my life.  He told me he had Tourette’s Syndrome and that’s why he started writing letters. By receiving a letter, people would get an impression of him before they met him, he said, and therefore might take the chance to get to know him.  Jerry could be as funny as hell.  One story I used to tell about him was that he wanted to write a book and so sent off a letter to a publisher outlining the contents.  “Yes, yes, we’re very interested,” replied the publisher. But when Jerry sent in a draft manuscript, the publisher refused to believe the same person wrote the book as wrote the letter, the book being so awful.  Valerie March, who then worked for Family Services Association, loved this story and asked me to tell it when we were at parties together. 

Jerry was more like Casanova than Gloria Steinam in the way he got the whole women and direct mail thing.  He trumpeted the fact that direct mail donors were women and argued with fundraising executives and Board members about copy that would appeal to them.  And in 1989, he insisted on a quite radical idea for the time: “When I am referring to the people who receive fundraising letters,” he wrote, “I will use ‘her’ and ‘woman’ . . .  I will use ‘man’ or ‘male’ only when specifically referring to a man.”  He wrote that under the chapter heading Learn to Love a Woman.

Mal Warwick was the second of my Fab Four. I pumped my fist in a silent salute when I received my copy of Revolution in the Mailbox.  Mal had just finished work on Jesse Jackson’s 1988 bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, raising about $6 million through DM.  His book was full of great mailing samples and I read for the first time what was to become mantra to a generation of fundraisers:  Renewal 1.  Renewal 2.  Renewal 3 . . . all the way to “most recalcitrant donor”; a phrased I loved as soon as I read it, adopted it as my own and have been using it ever since. 

Mal also had a newsletter at the time called Successful Direct Mail.  In every issue, he’d feature a special mailing picked from packages readers sent in.  I sent an acquisition mailing, an inexpensive roll, fold, slit that I had developed for the St. Stephen’s Community House Corner Drop-In Program.  It cost next to nothing to produce and had been quite successful.  Perhaps it would be featured in the newsletter!  Sad to say it wasn’t, but I received a lovely letter from Mal, saying it was a great piece, but that he wasn’t sure of the angle. 

Con Squires was another one of the great DM guys in my posse. I read every issue of Copy Clinic and critiqued every letter I wrote according to his Copy Rater Chart™.  My friend, Harvey McKinnon actually knew Con Squires and hired him to write copy occasionally.  Sensing an in, I asked Harvey to make the introduction.  He did and the next time I was in Boston I met Con Squires for lunch. He gave me great advice about an acquisition mailing for FoodShare, a control package they’ve been using ever since.  (I paid for lunch.)

But casting a shadow over everyone was a man I knew I would never meet.  He had retired to the south of France by the time I even knew what direct mail was.  But everyone knew who he was.  We all read and re-read the chapter on direct mail in a book he wrote in 1985.

David Ogilvy was best known as a Madison Avenue kind of ad guy, but he always advocated for what many ad guys turned their nose up at: direct marketing. 

And in his book Ogilvy on Advertising, he wrote, "direct response was my first love and later became my secret weapon.”

"Nobody should be allowed to create advertising for press or broadcast until he has served his apprenticeship in direct response. The experience will keep his feet on the ground for the rest of his life."

Jerry. Mal. Con. David.   And me. 

NEXT:  Rattle those pots and pans

Staging the Revolution

When I became a consultant on April 1, 1990, I believed I was on the right side of history.  I had worked at Interval House, the “oldest shelter for assaulted women in North America” for eight years, talked to and comforted hundreds of women and children fleeing unspeakable violence from belligerent jackasses who called themselves husbands and fathers.  I appeared on national TV as a shelter spokesperson to talk about the massacre at École Polytechnique and sat stunned and incredulous as Barbara Frum questioned whether it really had anything to do with the students being women.  On a more cheerful note, I did sit next to Blue Jays’ first baseman Willie Upshaw at least three times for lunch.  (His wife, Cindy, was an Interval House supporter and he was sweet and generous.) 

By striking out on my own and becoming a consultant, I believed I was a mercenary for good.  It wasn’t a career, as my life insurance guy said at the time, it was a calling.  I fancied myself a ranger, a free agent, a strategist and a fixer.   Instead of making one woman’s life easier, I was going for the whole megillah – equality for all women.

I would not be satisfied until the women’s movement in Canada became a well-resourced army of sunny avengers ensuring women didn’t get beaten, raped and paid two thirds the salary of men for the same job. Like a London cabbie, I had the knowledge.  I could see the path.  I knew the way to get there.  And I had the weapon, the secret weapon:  direct mail.  

While I was at the shelter, I watched money raised from direct mail put a roof over the heads of women and children with nowhere else to go, design pioneering programming for children who’d witnessed violence in the home and help women who felt invisible when they came to the shelter take pride themselves once more.  And, in a particularly satisfying smart-ass moment, it allowed us to say “no thanks” to the provincial government when they finally developed a funding formula for women’s shelters but insisted we populate the shelter with people who held graduate degrees in social work.    

And the kicker, the absolutely unbelievable score was that women owned direct mail. It’s how they gave money.  It was their turf.  No drama.  No big awards.  No galas.  Just a cup of tea, a cheque book and a BRE.  Writing DM letters was like being in a secret sisterhood.  

Back then I wrote: 

“As more women’s groups are becoming involved in fundraising, more women are becoming donors of organizations that deal specifically with women’s concerns:  shelters, political actions groups and so on.  A recent study done by Craver, Mathews, Smith states that the current [U.S.] social action population is comprised of about 10 – 12 million people who have given more than $250 million each year in small gifts to a multitude of social action organizations.  Three out of five people in this group are women . . . two in five of these women give to six social action groups or more.  Two thirds give more money than they did five years ago and half intend to give more in the future.”

We had the stealth of a silent army out there.  And these women weren’t giving to charity, they were giving to change. 

Then on April 11, 1990, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, the founder of MS magazine, said in the New York Times magazine,

“By deciding what causes she cares about, and then by supporting them enthusiastically, every woman can further her moral and ethical world view . . . giving money is itself a rejection of the feminine stereotype.  It involves risk taking, decision making and putting our money where our values are.  For me, the badge of feminist courage is visionary philanthropy.” 

The revolution was on. 

Next:  The Men Behind the Revolution