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”. 

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

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[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.