It seems that once again passion and a misguided belief that celebrities don’t do enough for charities has spawned another website that will neither help charities engage with the famous, nor will it do anything to enhance the work of the charities being featured.
Readers of my blogs over at the Guardian Voluntary Sector Network may recall Africa Needs You (ANY), which I felt, although well intentioned, was misguided. You can see that blog here. Indeed, Unicef, the charity that was to ‘benefit’ from ANY, commented on my blog, saying “UNICEF does not encourage any activity that seeks to embarrass or challenge celebrities in a negative way in a bid to secure their support for any cause”.
 |
Thanks to the ever eagled eyed @RobmDyson I have now discovered another well meaning but ultimately flawed attempt by enthusiastic volunteers trying to engage celebs with charities. Charity Bribes, unlike ANY, is more generous and charming in its tone and aims but won’t ultimately work for a number of reasons.
The concept is that individuals come up with ways in which a named celebrity could help a charity and then pledge money for the celebrity to do this. Site visitors vote for the favourite and each month the one with the most votes is selected to be taken forward. If the star in question does take up the challenge they have 30 days to participate. Should they do so then the money pledged will be sent to the charity – if not then the pledgers are not charged.
The creators, William Burks Spencer and Chris Baker, are quite clear that they are not affiliated to any charity which is featured and have made no prior contact with the celebrities.
So it’s a bit of fun and ultimately harmless? Right? Well yes and no. Let me break it down:
1) They have no prior relationship with the celebrity. That suggests to me that they therefore don’t know whether or not the celebrity already supports the charity.
2) They expect it to be completed in 30 days – this is a ridiculously short time in which to expect this to happen (if someone’s away filming a movie for the next six weeks then they’re scuppered). There is no consideration that the celebrity may have a ‘day job’ which controls their availability
3) There is no relationship with the charity. This too becomes a problem. The charity may have been trying to cultivate the chosen celeb for months and this won’t help that process
4) Random members of the public are selecting the activity without considering what the charity’s priorities might be. If you, as a charity, only get one or two requests from a high profile individual you’ll want to maximise the value that can generate
On the day I looked at the site the ‘bribe’ with the most votes was ‘Morgan Freeman to spend an afternoon narrating user-submitted animal videos’ with pledges going to the Red Cross. I can’t see how this really helps the charity.
1) Morgan already has a relationship with the American Red Cross
2) What have animal videos got to do with the Red Cross?
3) How does this highlight or advance the amazing work that the Red Cross does (apart from maybe raising a $1,000 or so)?
4) Who is going to organise these user-submitted videos? Who will edit them? Who will script them? Who will pay for this? What are you going to do with them afterwards?
5) If Morgan wanted to support the Red Cross again would this be the best use of the limited time he might be able to offer?
6) It is possible that an approach like this could damage the working relationship between the celebrity and the charity
7) If you were Morgan Freeman would you consider a donation of around $1,000 worth sacrificing your free time for when you know that offering the same amount of time at the right charity auction would raise considerably more for the cause?
My suggestion – let the charities decide what their priorities are and what the best use of potential celebrity support might be.
Whilst a nice idea, this project is not thought through and lacks any idea of how charities work or how they engage with celebrities. It’s always possible that I will be proved wrong but my gut reaction is that, apart from taking up the time and energies of its designers, it won’t achieve anything of value for the charities.
No comments:
Post a Comment