Tuesday, March 13, 2012

The Invisible Children Effect on Local Non-Profits

By Addie Nardi
Director of Resource Development

Over the past week, I have been watching the push from the California-based non-profit Invisible Children with abject fascination. The rapid rise of their Kony 2012 campaign and subsequent backlash has been a global example of the life of a lot of local non-profits. I admit, I was moved by their Kony 2012 video on YouTube, but I haven’t been studying it with the mindset of getting Kony 2012 posters to put all over Greencastle. It has definitely been more of a professional interest.

Have you watched the video? In short, it is a push to stop Ugandan war lord Joseph Kony, who uses children as sex slaves and fighters in his war against the Ugandan government.

It is a half hour long. Hundreds of thousands of people have watched this video… for a half hour. I’ve never made a Power Point over 10 minutes. I personally watched it on my Nook after putting my daughter to bed one night last week. I thought I’d only watch a few minutes of it and then go downstairs to spend time with my husband. I don’t typically have the attention span to watch a half hour of anything let alone a documentary.

I didn’t blink.

This documentary isn’t Sarah McLachlan singing a sad song while you’re looking at abused animals (which, by the way, I’m not allowed to watch anymore). It doesn’t appeal to emotions, as much as it does logic. Sure, when Jacob cried over his deceased brother, I got teary-eyed, but this group took hard facts and mixed in incredible graphics to make black and white points.

Non-profit, marketing and Facebook gurus have been saying for years what this push is proving… that you can’t do anything to move any needle on any issue without social media.

We are just, in Washington County, utilizing social media for its intended ‘grown up’ purposes (other than keeping up with friends). We have county commissioners who are updating Twitter and posting videos to Facebook. We have companies who are blogging (As well as a select number of non-profits!). But we still have a long way to go! United Way’s Facebook page sits at 444 likes, my goal two years ago was to get to 500 (so like us already, puh-lease!) and all I know about Twitter is that I am far too long-winded. But we’re getting there.

The fact is, we have to get there and the Kony 2012 project proves why. As county non-profits, we are faced with an aging donor demographic and no solid plan to bring in younger supporters. Why? Because we haven’t figured out how to engage generations who aren’t check-writers; or are commuters with busy social lives in another area; or are parents with kids doing a thousand different activities at a thousand different places. The call to action from Invisible Children was simply this: watch the video and tell your friends about it, and it has grown by leaps and bounds since then.

There is another interesting facet to this entire movement, and that is the backlash that it is receiving. I am ‘cool’ enough to have some teenage friends on Facebook. That sounded a lot weirder than I meant, the bulk of my teenage Facebook friends are kids who have come through Youth United Way (our high school initiative). The rest are probably related to me in some way, shape or form. It was the beginning of last week when I started seeing these kids pause in posting pictures of themselves and talking about typical teenage problems (which require an astonishing amount of caffeine to solve), to post about how this ‘Kony 2012’ video had to be watched and action had to be taken.

And just as quickly, these same kids were questioning the legitimacy of this organization. I have to admit, I was proud of their critical thinking. And wanting to know if it was true and if this organization was a scam, I immediately went to Guide Star to look up their 990. Their fundraising rate is like, 12.5% and their top three salaries are listed at around $85,000. They are based out of San Diego, so I can imagine that is a very reasonable salary.

On a much more local level, we constantly face similar backlash, as do our partner agencies. We are constantly being questioned about what we do with donor dollars, including, but not limited to, the programs we fund, the fanciness of our office, the programs that we DON’T fund and finally, the audacity that any one of us would dare to draw a salary.

I understand that we are constantly going to be held accountable for the sins of the ghosts of non-profits past. And I encourage the rhetoric. But this is what I told my inquisitive YUW kids, and what I would encourage you to do before you invest your hard earned dollars or precious time into a non-profit:

1. Educate yourself on where your non-profit is spending their money. However,
realize that just because you don’t agree, doesn’t make it wrong.

2. Make sure that your non-profit is transparent. If you had a question about
anything going on at United Way, all you would have to do is call. There
are only four of us who work here, one of us will know the answer!

3. Every non-profit that holds a 501C3 status is responsible for filing a Form-
990 with the IRS, but I would also look for a non-profit who had an audit
of some sort done by a professional accounting firm. Even though our
Finance Director is a Certified Public Accountant, we have a professional
audit done every year, and the auditing form fills out our Form-990.

4. You have every right to want to invest in a non-profit who is run on a
completely volunteer staff. However, very few of those exist. Probably
because there weren’t enough hours in the day to volunteer and make a go of
their cause. Also, there are very few of us who can afford to follow our
calling to serve for free. I have a mortgage and I have to buy diapers. So
go easy on me, or any other poor schlep who is just trying to make a
difference in their corner of the world. Believe me, if it weren’t for my
husband, I’d be on a Top Ramen diet.

In conclusion, I hope that our other county non-profits are paying attention to Invisible Children and Kony 2012. The amount I have learned in just one week (the good and the bad) is already making me a better United Way employee. I am anxiously waiting to see how the rest of it plays out.

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