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.