Scouts Honour? No-comment-beyond-what’s-in-the-statement

Like Gil Grissom, who played a forensic expert on TV, Your Working Girl has three crimes[1] that really get her goat.  And abuse of children is one of those crimes.  So when Your Working Girl tuned into the fifth estate last night to watch Scouts Honour and one of the first shots was an insistent Diana Swain chasing Scouts Canada CEO, Janet Yale, through a parking lot in the rain, she knew it couldn’t be good.  “For heaven’s sakes Janet!” my inside voice cried. “Turn around and speak to the woman.  Invite her up to your office for a proper interview. She’s talking about decades of abuse in the Scouting movement.  You are the CEO of Scouts Canada.  This is national TV.  Surely you understand now is not the time to turn your back.”

Your Working Girl’s outside voice speaks a little louder.  Why is it, she asks you, her Gentle Readers, that when charities are asked for explanations, they refuse to talk to the media?  Does being on the charitable side of righteousness mean that the need to be transparent does not apply?  Do charitable institutions somehow operate under different standards than government or business interests where the demand for transparency and accountability has people marching in the street.

By-and-large (and I say by-and-large because there are one or two exceptions[2]), when a charity is questioned about their actions or activities, the use of statements seems to be the only tool in the media relations tool box.  There is no Q & A for the charitable sector.  We don’t take questions.  And boo-hoo if anyone queries our motives.   We’re a charity for goodness sake.  Have you no pity?

Shame says Your Working Girl.  Shame.  Perhaps it’s BS fatigue, not donor fatigue, we’re looking at in the charitable sector she thinks (admittedly rather uncharitably).    

Scouts Canada is not the only charity that fits the no-comment-beyond-what’s-in-the-statement school of thought.  When cancer researchers set up an information booth at a Relay for Life event in Ancaster, Ontario this summer in an effort to let people know the percentage of the funding the Canadian Cancer Society designates to research had been declining and the story received national attention, the Society chose to issue an email statement as opposed to respond in person. 

And when the fundraising profession faced unprecedented federal legislation to impose a salary cap last year, a subject Your Working Girl has written about extensively, the Association of Fundraising Professionals did . . .  three guesses . . . issue a statement.[3] 

But Scouts Canada has an even more sacred responsibility. This is not about them.  It’s about the boys and young men who were violated under their watch.  And the pain expressed by those now angry, disillusioned and disturbed men who railed against those who looked the other way as they were repeatedly raped when they were children. If grown-up’s preying on vulnerable children is an anathema, what level of transgression is the grown-up who turns a blind eye  guilty of.  Is it the same? Worse?  Is it no crime at all?

This story is not going away.

CBC News reported this morning that “Scouts Canada has signed out-of-court confidentiality agreements with more than a dozen child sex-abuse victims in recent years, shielding the incidents from further media attention. In many of the agreements, a confidentiality clause prevents victims from revealing the amount paid or even the fact that there was a settlement. At least one bars a former boy scout from publicly divulging that the abuse took place.”

As John Cleese said in Fawlty Towers:  Just don’t talk about the war.

Diana Swain did eventually catch up with Janet Yale, CEO of Scouts Canada, just as she prepared to enter Scouts headquarters.  Janet turned around, spoke to Diana and referred her to what had been issued in the Scouts statement. 

It’s tough being a CEO.  It’s hard work.  And these are the kind of days that make it hard.  The days when you have to choose to do what’s right and what’s easy.   The facts are there.  Children were abused under Scouts leadership.  Scouts settled in more than a dozen cases making confidentiality a part of the settlement.  There is no question of this.  But for all that is good and holy about Scouts (and there is much to praise) the strategy going forward has to be based what is best for those children who were betrayed, not what’s best for the Scouts brand.   Answer the questions that are being asked of you – in person.  Put the children first.  And that’s not just a message for Scouts.  The message is for all charities serving the vulnerable and marginalized:  it’s not all about you. 

[1] Violence against women, abuse of children, drug dealing

[2] One exception is the redoubtable Rebecca Davies of MSF/DWB who called Matt Galoway, CBC radio Toronto morning show on his use of the term “chuggers” (charity muggers), to describe MSF face-to-face workers.  She was, and MSF often is, great at being upfront.  Rebecca is also speaking at AFP this year and should not be missed.

[3](Your Working Girl has been invited by AFP to speak at the AFP Congress on 2:00 on November 28^th.   on “How We’ve Shot Ourselves in the Foot”.  She’d love to see you there to chat more about this).

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Battle Beyond the Blades

After sharing a bountiful Thanksgiving with family and friends, Your Working Girl was walking to a working girl work-out when a high-definition vision of Don Cherry dressed like a Christmas tree skirt appeared before her like a caterwauling demon who refused to be batted away. Her heart raced.  What was this vision?  Why now? 

Because hockey is treated more like a holy sacrament than a sport in Canada and the National Hockey League can be as transparent as a monastery, Your Working Girl is has been mildly encouraged  that mental illness, suicide, addiction and depression have seen the light of day in the context of the NHL.  The death of three players over the summer, two from suicide, has hockey is doing its version of soul searching.   How can this be a bad thing for people suffering mental illness?

The pain spilling out onto the ice of this opening season is without precedent.  When Rick Rypien’s mother, Shelley Crawford, dropped the ceremonial puck for the Winnipeg Jets opener on Sunday night alongside co-owners Dave Thomson and Mark Chipman, and NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman, the crowd rose up in a deafening ovation, chanting Rypien’s name. 

When former Toronto Maple Leaf and Nashville Predator Wade Belak took his own life days before his appearance on Battle of the Blades, former Leaf Russ Courtnall jumped in to replace him.  On Monday night when Russ and his skating partner, Kim Navarro, performed their last duet on the show, Kim broke into tears saying she’s thought of Wade every day since his death.   

Maybe a tipping point mused Your Working Girl.

Maybe not. 

From his throne on Coaches Corner and upon whom CBC’s executives have apparently bestowed divine providence, Don Cherry, Canada’s PT Barnum of hockey, glides into this icy mist of pain with the cocky assurance of a man who has made a career of providing commentary in the language of ridicule and abuse.  Sputtering and irate, he accused three former players Stu Grimson, Chris Nilan and Jim Thomson of being “pukes”, “turncoats” and “hypocrites” for speaking out about mental health and violence in hockey.   

Appalled by the CBC’s promotion of Mr Barnum, Your Working Girl sent a stern email to Kiristine Stewart, Executive VP of English program and CBC Board Chair Hebert Lacroix telling them she found the beatification Don Cherry and his circus inexplicable.  If the CBC has determined this man is the only one who can offer hockey fans informed commentary, heaven help us.  Sure, he tells kids to keep their stick on the ice and to keep their head up but it's advice increasingly wrapped in a blanket of anger, intolerance and vanity.   With Don Cherry, you don’t get one without the other.

Your Working Girl, mind you, is under no illusion that the CBC will listen, or even read, her missive.  The CBC is not, after all, the Toronto Blue Jays.  But there’s one thing she does want to make perfectly clear to CBC television and to her Gentle Readers.  Your Working Girl has been a loyal supporter of the network since birth.  She has spoken out when the network’s funding was in jeopardy from those nasty conservatives in Ottawa who just don’t get the moral imperative of public television. 

Well . . . phooey on that.  

The CBC can continue to broadcast as many specials as they wish featuring an ernest Linden McIntyre tsk tsking about the Catholic Church condoning abuse of children. They can continue to talk about their 75 year history in the tones of a Vatican Eucharist.  But as long as they provide a chair on national television for a man who hurls insults, screams at people with mental illness and addiction problems and ridicules anyone who disagrees with him, they are to Your Working Girl’s reckoning, an unresponsive institution that puts its own interests above those of its viewers and the people of Canada who pay for their very existence.   

Hopefully, Hockey Night in Canada sponsors will see the light of day at some point soon.  Because the network itself can’t be trusted to make the decision.  CBC television is letting Canadians down.  From coast to coast to coast. 

At the very least, the CBC could, as the fab editorial in today’s Globe and Mail Men of Dignity, not Pukes suggests:

“. . . bring these three men on to Coach’s Corner to face Mr. Cherry, and let him, and all of hockey, hear what a human being feels like after 250 bare-knuckle fights.”

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That-which-must-not-be-named

Since the Toronto Blue Jays finished up their 2011 season with a perfect 500 record (81 – 81), Your Working Girl is now turning to a serious matter that reared its painful head as the sun shone, the lakes glistened and the wind rustled through the trees. 

And fair warning to you, Gentle Reader, the matter is like Lord Voldemort.  It is deathly and we’ve tried to keep it at bay by not speaking its name. 

The Globe and Mail reported the passing of Winnipeg Jets forward Rick Rypien on August 15, 2011 using the common code words “it was a sudden but not suspicious death.”

The omerta loosened up 15 days later when former Toronto Maple Leaf Wade Belak died of an ‘apparent suicide.’

Then 11-year-old Toronto boy Mitchell Wilson took his own life just hours after he learned he would have to testify against the 12-year-old boy who bullied him.  When his grief-stricken father spoke to the media about his loss, it became impossible not to talk about suicide. 

Aside from the cultural and religious taboos associated with suicide (let’s leave cultural and religious hero worship associated with suicide for another day), there is the widespread idea that suicide is contagious and that if it is talked about or reported on, it will turn viral and result in many more suicides among people who are already vulnerable.  

The idea of copycat suicide is referred to as the ‘Werther principle’.  Taking his inspiration from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, American sociologist David Philips coined the romanticized term in 1974.  Goethe’s wildly popular novel published 200 years earlier in 1774 features the letters of the tormented, lovelorn protagonist who ultimately takes his own life because he’ll never have the woman he loves.  One impact of Goethe’s novel was that young men across Europe adopted the blue pants, yellow jacket and white shirt favoured by the young Werther. And, as an important book in the angst filled Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) period of German literature, it also reportedly led to the first recorded example of what authorities thought were copycat suicides. 

Research conducted by Philips and others linked the commission of suicide and reporting of suicide.  When newspapers when on strike, suicide rates seemed to decrease or when celebrity suicides were covered prominently, suicide rates increased.  There is even research that suggests that single vehicle motor accidents increase when a suicide story is a lead news item.  Not all researchers agree on the Werther effect.  Some say the data has been selective.  They point to the fears of copycat suicides not materializing after Kurt Cobain took his own life.  Nonetheless, organizations like the Canadian Psychiatric Association issue comprehensive guidelines on reporting suicide which, to Your Working Girl’s eye, look so cumbersome they would make any responsible editor recoil from covering the issue at all. 

Your Working Girl believes the questions must be asked:    

1.      In an effort to protect potentially vulnerable people, have we have promoted a code of silence that is doing more harm than good?

2.      By focusing on the power of copycat suicides and the way news agencies report suicide are we completely missing the reasons why so many Canadians feel such despair they choose to die?

That the reportage of suicide is blamed for increasing the incidents of suicide feels a bit off to  Your Working Girl.  After all, the silence around wife assault kept it hidden – and deadly – for so long.  Responsible journalists will pretty consistently report responsibly.  News agencies that choose to sensationalize events like rape and murder will continue to do so.  Does that mean we should just not talk about it? 

If there’s anything good that can come out of the personal tragedies Canadians have become aware of in the last few months, let it be that we can break the silence on suicide.  The stats are truly alarming:

·         Today 10 Canadians will take their own lives, a per capita rate three times that of the United States’

·         Suicide is the leading cause of death in men ages 25 to 29 and 40 to 44

·         Suicide is the leading cause of death in women ages 30 to 34

·         Suicide is the second leading cause of death among adolescents

People living in Toronto might be particularly interested to know that between 1999 and 2009, 150 killed themselves by throwing themselves in front of TTC subway trains, more than one a month. 

Bob Rae said it beautifully in an article he wrote for the Globe and Mail on October 4, 2011, in which he thoughtfully advocates a national suicide strategy:

            “Lives lost, kids struggling with identity and bullying, young people suddenly feeling adrift       and abandoned, veterans returning home from duty, older people struggling with health and uncertain of the way ahead. What we now realize is a simple truth: Suicide is not just a personal tragedy, a life cut short, an existential decision that leaves disbelief and devastation behind.”

                “It is no surprise, then, that all of us have been touched by suicide, have lost friends and loved ones, and have tried to figure out why lives that seemed together and well-focused are suddenly ended. But the bewilderment of silence and pain that surrounds mental  health has to end. It is no longer just a personal question; it is now a political question.”

It’s time to break the silence on suicide.

Your Working Girl has concluded that there is virtually nothing that cannot be explicitly discussed in the media these days.  (Think Rick Santorum.) Yet suicide is still described in code.  It seems . . .  well . . .  madness, that a soul-destroying tragedy affecting thousands of families across the country,  including the family of some of Your Working Girl’s dearest friends, continues to be talked about in hushed tones. In an effort to shed some light on how we communicate issues around suicide, fundraise for suicide prevention and reduce suicide, Your Working Girl’s next few columns will focus on this topic and the people who are working on it.     

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The front office weighs in

Holy cow!

When Your Working Girl expressed the simple wish to have the Blue Jays front office show they cared about the fans, she’s afraid she shocked a good many of her Gentle Readers by the fact that she cared about baseball at all.  And she was as stunned as anyone to think that her future calling might be as a baseball writer.  But in her humble effort to reach out in her hour of baseball need what she marveled at most was that, you, her Gentle Readers soothed her baseball soul with a flood of poetic baseball musings worthy of the memory of Phil Rizzuto:   

•  "I was in the Jays’ dressing room on opening day in April of ’77 at Exhibition Stadium shooting a Shoppers drug commercial and I still have an autographed ball signed by the whole team.”  
• "What do you think about Michael Iggy saying he is a Die Hard Red Sox fan- And he wants to be Prime Minister- Would that be Prime Minister of Boston, Massachusetts?
  ”
• “You might just be lucky enough to see Lind hit one just over the first baseman's head to drive in  the winning runs in the bottom of the ninth rather than hit one right at him.”
• "Pretty stunned of them not having enough programs to go around.  I notice there was no shortage of them at the F1 race in Montreal last year.”
• "Contrary to what baseball bards think, it's not the opera.”  

Your Working Girl was entertained, moved and inspired by the missives of her Gentle Readers.   In fact, she was so distracted by them, she almost forgot that the previous evening she had dashed off sternly-worded emails to Howard Starkman and Paul Beeston saying she would not darken the door of the Rogers Centre until she felt the Blue Jays brass cared.  (Your Working Girl believes it is important to be specific in her negotiations.)   But Paul Beeston’s email, which arrived at precisely 12:20pm on Monday afternoon, snapped her to her baseball senses.   As she read the note from Paul saying he wanted her to know the Blue Jays did care about the fans, didn’t want to make excuses and apologized for running out of programs, she could feel the ice melting in her cold, cold heart.

And when she received Howard Starkman’s note the following afternoon recalling his memories of the strike, the fun of baseball scoring, details of how the programs were printed, how he wanted her to know the Jays cared about the fans  . . . .and that he read Your Working Girl’s blog and liked it . . . she was pretty much convinced.  That two of major league baseball’s top executives responded so personally and so quickly to a baseball fan whose very good friend refers to as The Devil Lady of Baseball seems to be . . .  oh, what’s that adjective my sports fan friends use to describe their team when it does something well off the field . . .  uh, let’ see . . . classy.  Yes, classy.  How Paul Beeston and Howard Starkman responded was classy. 

For a lot of people who love the game, we just want it to love us back. 

And for anyone reading this who believes scorekeeping is the new knitting, I want to share a little authentic Phil Rizzuto with you.  As a man who had a brilliant career as shortstop for the New York Yankees, and broadcasted Yankees’ games on radio and television for 40 years, Rizzuto came up with a unique scoring notation:  “WW”.   It stood for "Wasn't Watching."

Unbelievable!

(You can now sign up to follow Your Working Girl by email.  Just scroll back up to the upper right hand corner, type your email into the box and press Submit.  In the event you are a search engine marketer, you’ll understand how sweet is it that Your Working Girl is now the number one search result for that term on Google, Yahoo and Bing.  As Lainey Lui, proprietress of Lainey Gossip and the finest gossip blogger in the free world, says, “Thank you, love you, owe you.”)

The outlook wasn’t brilliant

To Howard Starkman VP, Special Projects  and Paul Beeston, CEO of the Toronto Blue Jays, it might seem like a trifle that there were no programs available for Sunday’s Opening Weekend game. To them it might register as a pesky detail that fans like Your Working Girl who invited a friend, carefully selected our seats, and spent $160.50 on tickets, could not review the team’s 2011 line-up and keep score of the game. 

Maybe they would think it overly sentimental to place such importance on what is, after all, only paper; Possibily they view it as old-fashioned to use the program as a means to survey the promise of a new season when anything is possible.  

They might chortle at the silliness of baseball fans like me who bought a new “baseball scorecard eraser” to keep my scorecard less messy this year and arrived 45 minutes early to “get organized”.

Well, Dearest Most-Wonderful Gentle Readers, I have a message for the Messrs Starkman and Beeston, and all those in the Blue Jays organization who bleed fans to death with a thousand little cuts like this one:  I love baseball.  And I like the Blue Jays.  As a mere slip of a thing, I spent many games watching the team from the bleachers in Exhibition Stadium, learning about the game, watching the plays, the strategy and how high the outfielders wore their socks.  In the off season I kept company with great baseball writers like Roger Angell and Roger Kahn.  I had lunch with Willie Upshaw for Chrissakes! (See my very first blog.)

But baseball broke this Working Girl’s heart.  The strike of 1994/95 outraged and sickened me so much that it ruined the game for me.  The debacle which culminated in a year with no World Series showed that major league baseball cared nothing for the fans.  And fans thumbed their noses at baseball by staying away in droves when the regular season opened in 1995.  I personally responded by not watching or attending a baseball game for 12 years.   Baseball has never really recovered from that time.  But in the last couple of years, with a few tentative steps, Your Working Girl came back to baseball, bought a few tickets, checked the box scores and followed the progress of the home team. 

 
Time, after all, is supposed to heal all wounds . . . and, just to be on the safe side, many people who worked in baseball during the strike had retired.  And when, during last year’s National League play-off, the Giants’ Tim “the Freak” Lincecum dueled with former Blue Jay and now Phillies’ starter, Roy “Doc” Halladay, my heart fully embraced the calculus of the game once more.  This year, I decided to dive in and attend the Blue Jays Opening Weekend.  Like patching it up with an old friend, I was eager to get started. 

But guess what, Gentle Reader?  My old friend wasn’t interested my fanship.  He hadn’t changed his spots at all.  While I could buy a Blue Jays hat for $30, I couldn’t buy a program.   I walked around Level 1, then around Level 2 of the Rogers Centre checking in at all the guest services.  I stopped a well-dressed man with important-looking ID tags on his waist and a cellphone in his hand.  “Do you know where I might get a program?” “I’m not with the “Blue Jays organization itself”, he said and cheerfully offered that “about 20 people have asked me the same thing.”   There were no programs to be had.

“How can you run out of programs on Opening Weekend?”  I asked as I pleaded with the guest services clerk in disbelief.  My anticipation of blissfully scoring the game as it ebbed and flowed on the field was quickly evaporating.  How could this be?  She made a call.  “Well, there are more people than expected,” she said when she put the phone down.

“More people than expected?” 

“Yes.”

“So the Blue Jays are all out of programs on opening weekend?”

“Yes.”

“Because they didn’t know how many people to expect?”

“Yes.”

Hell hath no fury . . .  and clearly scorned, Your Working Girl registered a formal written complaint while standing at the Guest Services booth in Section 236 of the Rogers Centre, missing the second and third inning.   I have since written a sternly-worded email to Paul Beeston and Howard Starkman (both of whom were, incidentally, working in baseball during in the strike and have not retired).  I will keep you, Gentle Reader, posted on any response. My friend began to refer to me as The Devil Lady.

For people who run a team in a game that adjusts a pitcher's earned run average according to the qualities of his ballpark and his league, but runs out of programs on opening weekend, says one of two things:   We are idiots or we don’t give much thought about the actual people attending the game.    

If we view baseball as a prism through which to view life (and I assure you many fans do), the symbolism of Sunday’s game was poignant.  It was the bottom of the ninth, the score was 4-3 Minnesota, two men on base, two men out, Jose Bautista himself at the plate.  Fans are on their feet.  Bautista walks to first.  Bases are loaded.  The crowd is wild.  Adam Lind hits a curveball on the first pitch.  It was scooped up rolling down the first-base line.  Game over. 

Far be it

Far be it for Your Working Girl to offer career advice to anyone, but a recent New York Times article, Political Blogs Ready to Flood Campaign Trail caught her weather eye during the same week that three students from Ken Wyman’s program at Humber College volunteered to do a case study on the www.notobillc470.com campaign for a class assignment.  It always warms Your Working Girl’s heart to see young people enthusiastic about learning effective campaign technique (as opposed to . . . . let’s say for the sake of it  . . . branding).  Ken runs a great program out there at Humber with very fine students.  Your Working Girl has always said this.   

Your Working Girl has also maintained that election campaigns are like war.  In the same way that war results in significant medical and scientific advancement, election campaigns (especially big ones like U.S. presidential campaigns) are well-funded laboratory tests for improving the way in which we engage donors, voters or consumers.     

U.S. players like Politico, Talking Points Memo and RealClearPolitics are already laying the ground and hiring bloggers to report on what’s happening down on the farm in the lead up to the November 2012 presidential election.  

“We were a garage band in 2008, riffing on the fly,” Jim VandeHei, Politico’s executive editor and co-founder told the New York Times.  “Now we’re a 200-person production, with a precise feel and plan.”

Blog reporters, each attached to a candidate and armed with a laptop and a flip video phone, are posting the candidate’s schedule, reporting on candidate meetings, the state of campaign finances, and catching the pearls of wisdom frequently uttered in early campaigns.  And they ride pretty cheap.  Right now, twenty-five-year-old Kendra Marr is shadowing Tim Pawlenty, former Republican governor from Minnesota, who may take a run at the Republication nomination.  And these bloggers are doing it, if you’ll pardon the expression, respectably, just like, if you’ll pardon another expression, real reporters.  This idea is a ten-strike.

Terry Fallis didn’t win Canada Reads with his CanPol book The Best Laid Plans for nothing (unless it was having the best-known defender).  And, with a six-week commitment, Canadian elections offer much better working conditions than the U.S.  And so, Gentle Reader, in anticipation of a soon-to-be-called federal election, Your Working Girl is putting it to you:  Be the citizen/blogger/reporter.  Pick a candidate.  Any candidate.  Why not pick someone that no one will hear about unless you blog about them?  Find out who they are and why they’re running.  The vast majority of candidates get no campaign coverage whatsoever.  True story.   I will even put together a little handbook for you on how to be a good citizen/blogger/reporter.  (I am Your Working Girl after all.)

At any rate, it’s time the 140-character crowd got taken down a peg or two.  In the mist of Twitter posts about “I’m so running late for the bus” and “Go Packers”, both the Prime Minister and Industry Minister Tony Clement tweeted major public announcements in the past couple of weeks.   

“True. CRTC must go back to drawing board,” Mr. Clement tweeted after being asked if it was correct the government would act “if the CRTC does not back down” [on killing unlimited internet access].

Are we governing by tweet now? 

But the big news is that, apparently, Mr. Clement, Minister of Industry, swings a bigger Twitter stick than our Prime Minister although Prime Minister Harper has more than 80,000 followers as opposed to Mr. Clement’s 8,000 followers.  What’s up?

What’s up is the  Peace, Order and Googeable Government study released late last week by Mark Blevis, and reported in The Globe and Mail.  The study, worth reading in its entirety, has Mr Clement scoring higher on the Klout scale.   

Mr. Clement has a Klout score of 62 and a “True Reach” of 3,000.  Mr. Harper, meanwhile, has a Klout score of 58 but a “True Reach” of only 9. That’s because Mr. Clement tweets constantly, engages his audience and makes a “meaningful connection” says the study.  The Prime Minister does not; instead, he sends out links to press releases and photo ops.

There’s a lesson to be had here for the fashion-forward networkers out there.  Big numbers don’t mean big impact.  Think about going auteur.   Improve your Klout score.  Becoming a citizen/blogger/reporter could help in that regard.  And, if you don’t mind, while you’re at it, please stop telling us what you had for lunch (unless you’re Stephen Fry that is).

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”.