On a frigid, stormy, Wellington day in May, I stood with four friends at the edge of Wellington harbour, about to stand up to my shoulders in freezing water for five minutes. The task was to raise money for kids born with heart defects – but three months later I had to Google the actual name of the charity.
Most of my friends and I had no real connection to the charity @Heart. Mostly, we thought it would be fun, and we’d raise some money for an important cause, while dressing up and probably making idiots of ourselves.
Faced with the grey water of the harbour, as rain pelted down, and the wind drowned out the sound of the top-40 radio station that was sponsoring the event, I wondered why I hadn’t just donated money directly. Flicking them $40 from my banking app, while I sipped a cup of tea would have been easy. And I wouldn’t have had to spend weeks cajoling my colleagues and shaming my friends on Facebook into pledging to support me. Jumping into the harbour – which had, at the tail end of summer seemed like an excellent idea – just didn’t seem worth it anymore.
Making oneself cold for charity isn’t a new phenomenon at all, but the latest iteration of it, the Ice (bucket) challenge has gone impressively viral. Anna Wintour has done it. Bill Gates, Patrick Stewart, Kristen Stewart and Nicholas Hoult have all done it. President Obama declined to accept Ethel Kennedy’s challenge, saying he’d donate instead. Taylor Swift is one of the few celebrities to have visibly “put her money where her mouth is”.
But, has all this cold water actually turned in to any cold hard cash? Or is the challenge the very height of slacktivism? How many people actually got around to giving their money – and is it even helpful for charities? The ice bucket challenge has been criticised in two ways: that it is narcissistic self-promotion, and that it isn’t actually good for the charities people say they are giving to. Charities need sustainable funding – one offs like the ice bucket challenge might raise a lot of money, but once that money has been spent, it’s next to impossible to create a new campaign to replicate it. One critic called it a “middle-class wet-T-shirt contest for armchair clicktivists”.
Whether all the people who have filmed their challenge on their smartphones have actually handed over the cash – ten dollars if they completed the challenge and 100 if they didn’t – is impossible to know. But in the US, the organisation benefitting has been the ALS Association, which fights a form of Motor Neuron disease often called Lou Gehrig’s disease. As of last week, it has received US$94.3 million in donations compared to $2.7 million during the same time period last year. That’s 2.1 million new donors. In New Zealand, the phenomenon has mostly been and gone – though the All Blacks were late to jump on the bandwagon.
One of the charities that people were giving to when the Ice Bucket Challenge swept through New Zealand was the Child Cancer Foundation. Through fundraising websites like Give a Little and Everyday Hero, raised about 180 thousand dollars for the charity.
“From our organisation’s perspective, that’s really humbling,” says the Foundation’s chief executive, Robyn Kiddle, “It’s encouraging to see that there’s a group of people out there, that if you hit the right note with them, absolutely happy to support you.”
“Young people who are on social media, who enjoy the concept of a challenge, sort of dobbying their mates in…what I’ve found really encouraging by it, is there’s a group of young people, and they’re true to their word – they do donate.”
Kiddle says with most of the donations being around ten and twenty-five dollars, the organisation struggled to keep up with the administration. But the Ice Challenge was definitely worth it. “It has definitely been an eye-opener for me to be able to understand how to be able to maximise the support you can get from the community, without incurring too much cost to get it.“
But she points out that it’s not something a charity can plan for – there’s no way to make something go viral. “No-makeup selfies struck a chord in the UK, but didn’t massively cotton on here. I’m not sure that it’s something a charity itself can start.”
And that’s the challenge for most charities – how to raise money, without that in itself costing too much, and how to minimise the administration of fundraising, so that they can get on with the actual work of helping people.
Solving that dilemma was what led Pat Shepherd to set up One Percent Collective. One-off giving is great, he says, but it has limited impact on the future of a charity. Regular giving means that charities can budget long-term, and asking people to give one percent “isn’t that much.”
One Percent uses social media to get its message out. But social media presents its own pitfalls. Is liking a status update activism? What about a retweet, or reblog on Tumblr? Does posting a selfie actually do anything for breast cancer awareness, or changing a profile picture to a red square for aids awareness?
Research by two academics at Michigan State University suggests it actually might. Yu-Hao Lee and Gary Hsieh found that participants who signed a petition were more likely to donate to a charity when the charity was related to the petition’s cause (PDF link).
Shepherd says there’s a balance between getting people into a room and seeing what the charities do and the kind of engagement that comes through sharing stories online. More comes from people seeing how the charity works, he says, but there’s use in the “smiles” that happen online too. “We get lots of responses from people saying ‘that made my mum cry’.”
“Quite often it does translate into funding, he says. “People often say things like ‘the Black Seeds posted something on Facebook’.”
And asked who they think will “save the world”, more than two thirds said “kind citizens”, more than government and business combined.
A 2011 report from Philanthropy New Zealand (PDF link) says that the country has a big heart: just over one million people gave to charitable causes that year. New Zealanders were estimated to have given $2.67 billion to charitable and community causes in 2011, and personal giving represented 60 per cent of all donations (rather than businesses or trusts.)
One Percent Collective this year ran its own online survey, with about 500 respondents – of which 70 per cent were between 18 and 40. Of those who chose to fill out the survey, most said they like to contribute to society with their time, skills, or sharing messages about things that are important. Just over eighty per cent said they give money to causes. And asked who they think will “save the world”, more than two thirds said “kind citizens”, more than government and business combined.
One of the charities that One Percent Collective works with is Wellington-based Kaibosh. The organisation is “New Zealand's first dedicated food rescue service.” The idea is that it takes food from retailers and arranges to get it to community organisations that work with people in need.
The organisation’s co-founder and chairperson, George Langlands, says he and his partner Robyn “fell into” starting a not-for-profit organisation. Robyn was working part time at Women’s Refuge, which was offered leftover meals from food-retailer Wishbone. But getting the food, storing it and distributing it ended up being more difficult than they expected.
“Over the next 18-months we roped a couple of friends in to help us out, moved to doing our personal food shop on a Friday night so the fridge was as empty as possible come Thursday evening and looked into what it would take to start doing this on a larger scale,” George says.
The couple applied for local government and lotteries grants and registered the organisation as a charitable trust, and by August 2010 had enough money to rent a space and hire a person part-time for six months. The organisation now has a full-time general manager, six part time staff, and more than 80 volunteers. Since it began, it has ‘rescued’ over 280,000kgs of food which equates to about 800,000 meals.
Listen to Robyn Langlands speak to Radio New Zealand’s Nine to Noon.
George Langlands imagines a lot of people have Googled "ALS" since the ice bucket challenge kicked off, and that given the amount of money it has raised, it is doing something. But for every Ice Bucket challenge, he points out, there are thousands of “viral” campaigns that don’t get anything more than a couple of retweets. Charlie Sheen, who doused himself in a bucket of cash, saying “ice is going to melt, but this money is going to actually help people”, has the right idea, George says.
“You ask most charities and they'll tell you that they need volunteers and money,” George says. “Kaibosh really needs reliable funds whether this is in the form of on-going donations, long-term corporate sponsorship or an ongoing revenue stream (this is why a lot of charities run op-shops). While there’s a couple of organisations that have pledged long-term support, “like most not-for-profits we run on the smell of an oily rag and are always watching our balance sheet.”
He says the use of Facebook and Twitter depends what an organisation is trying to do. And while it is good for raising awareness and keeping supporters updated, he’s not sure how much that translates into dollars or volunteers. “In our case, I think seeing the Kaibosh van on the streets of Wellington as we go about picking up food from retailers probably does as much for our image as Twitter and Facebook does.” And he says “old-school media”, like being in the newspaper or on the radio, still helps.
Back on that freezing beach in May, we raised more than $3,600 by standing in Oriental Bay for five minutes. Without actually doing something as silly as that, it would have been difficult to convince people to part with their hard-earned cash. And it was undoubtedly a great thing to do. But I can’t help but wonder if we’d all have done more good – and caused fewer headcolds – by setting up an automatic payment for five dollars a week, and sharing that on Facebook.
Pat Shepherd agrees, saying there probably needs to be a balance between the Facebook likes and doing work offline. “Whether that’s volunteering, or through funding. Essentially, if we can get the good word out there on generosity, on top of good things happening, it is all going to be for the best.”
Cover photo: Flickr user Hamish Foxley