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”. 

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.