The River of Good Intentions and Buckets of Promotion
As I stated in The Long Tail of Charities, there are a lot of charities and a lot of people with good intentions. So how come we still see so many things go wrong in the world?
You could argue that there are not enough people who care. I don’t buy that. We all have different levels of commitment, but most people actually like to make a difference for the positive. A report made for the CBF called: Publieksvertrouwen in de goede doelensector (PDF) shows the following about the state of trust Dutch people have about charities:
“Met de stelling dat goede doelen het geld dat ze krijgen goed besteden is slechts 17% het eens en geeft 50% een neutraal antwoord.”
Translation in English:
“17% agrees to the statement that charities spent the money they receive in the right way, and 50% was neutral about the statement.”
To the question of why don’t more people make a difference for the positive by donating to charities?, I state that this is due to two factors:
People find it hard to find a charity that..
1. .. matches their moral compass.
2. .. they trust.
If people do not trust the organizations presented to them, they might start their own charity, but they also might just give up. They know there is probably a charity they’d support, but it takes years of research to find a charity with exactly their intentions and more importantly that they dare to trust. You can blame them for not taking more time and effort. But how will that help save the world?
So there is a river of good intentions slamming against a wall. The water stops.
Most of the time, this is the moment where buckets of promotion enter the stage. We start to take these buckets and use them to throw the water over the wall. This way people will take some extra time and energy in figuring out what they want or they’ll change their mind in what they want. That’s using the buckets of promotion to try to change the path of the river. Greenpeace is using a lot of money in these efforts. In their annual report of 2005 (.PDF) they state:
“The total gross income of Greenpeace World Wide in 2004 was 158.5 million euro, 0.6 percent lower than in 2003, representing a small percentage decline in income. Total Greenpeace supporter numbers were approximately 2.7 million globally at the end of 2004.
Fundraising and organisation support costs remained approximately constant, as did campaign expenditure, which remained stable at 86.5 million euros. Fundraising costs in this context include the cost of certain communication activities not requesting donations. The allocation of costs across the various campaign categories alters on an annual basis depending on campaign priorities and timing of campaign work during the year.
Maintaining and raising the level of campaign expenditure is a clear priority, which is why significant amounts are invested in fundraising to support campaign activities, particularly those in territories where Greenpeace has historically had less presence, such as India and South East Asia.”
So what does this make clear? Greenpeace has a lot of big buckets. It’s the game they know, and they are good at it. But not every organisation has the money to use this strategy. And even if they do have the money, charities would rather invest the money directly in their charity goals. To make saving the world more efficient, we need a different strategy. So how would you try to keep the river flowing?
Let the river flow. Break down the wall.
Let’s accept that there are a lot of people that have good intentions, but don’t want to take the extra time and effort it takes to find a charity that they support and really trust. If we want to help them to change the world for the better, then this means we need to make it easy for people to find the charity they know is in line with their intentions and they know they can trust.
Every charity in the world should be easily findable, that’s why the website needs to be decentralized. We need that long tail of charities and it’s impossible for a central organ to keep track of them. It also means we need a system in place taking care of the trust part of the equation. This also leads us to decentralization, I’ll get into that in more detail, when I’ll post about social networking and emergence.
Let’s get back to what the goal is: facilitate people to change the world for the better.
That’s why saving the world is easy. I’m just going to do what I’m good at, that is setting up this system, this website, that will break down the wall. I don’t mess with the river, I’m not going to collect all the information about charities, I’m not going to try to convince anyone they should care, and I’m definitely not going to be a moral judge on what a better world should look like. All I’ll do is facilitate people to change to world for the better. Hence the slogan on this blog: saving the world, by making a website.