Icebucketchallenge is the new nomakeupselfie
In this post I will compare the recent #icebucketchallenge phenomenon with the earlier #nomakeupselfie trend.
#icebucketchallenge and #nomakeupselfies have much in common
- Both have raised a large amount of money for a charity - £8m for Cancer Research UK and so far just over $1m for the ALS association in the US.
- Both originated outside of the charity, and then later were adopted by the charity
- Both involve nominating people - that's why they're "viral"
- Both involved an innovative medium for people to "self-display" - i.e. to share their image on social media
Interestingly, the #nomakeupselfie phenomenon seems to be heavily female-oriented, whereas #icebucketchallenge is more balanced or even possibly more male-oriented.
Charities should crowdsource the ingenuity rather than innovating themselves
I fear that we will see lots of charities working hard to try to emulate these success stories for themselves
Sorry to break it to you folks, but if you think your marketing department can come up with another brilliant idea like this and make it take off, you're being optimistic.
The icebucketchallenge started as a dare that was circulated among some pro athletes (Source: slate) - the link to the ALS association came only later.
So can a new viral fundraising campaign be innovated by a charity? Probably not. These sorts of dares, games, pranks and other bits of messing around are happening all the time all over the world; it's only occasionally that something goes viral. Trying to find something that is going to capture the Zeitgeist just right is incredibly hard to engineer yourself, but can happen through natural Darwinian processes.The risk is that valuable charity marketing resource could be unprofitably used trying to emulate these effects.
Is this a good thing for philanthropy?
At first glance it seems the answer must be yes. With charitable giving coming to around 2% of GDP, some would say that we could afford to give more, and since fun things like this help to bring about more giving, it's a step in the right direction.
Or do they? As William MacAskill has pointed out, it is likely that a large part of the donations generated so far have been "cannibalised" from other charities, even if there was not necessarily an explicit and thought-through decision to reallocate funding from one charity to another.
If that's true, then we should ask
- How many investigated the impact of ALS Association or Cancer Research UK before giving, and how it compares to other charities?
- How many questioned the amount being given (ie whether the charities might not need such a large sum of money)?
I suspect that the answer to both questions is probably that nobody considered these issues.
Another angle is that such fads serve at least to raise awareness of important issues. But do they?- How many people really learned anything new about cancer or ALS before giving?
While many (but not all) would agree that the world would be a better place if people were to carefully think about their giving, for me the important challenge is this: what can be done to make it easy for people to give thoughtfully rather than randomly?
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Interesting further reading
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/08/12/icebucketchallenge_you_don_t_need_an_ice_bucket_to_donate_to_als_research.html
http://qz.com/249649/the-cold-hard-truth-about-the-ice-bucket-challenge/
Charitable giving = 2% of GDP (source of this stat)
- Total giving to charity in the US was $335.17 billion in 2013 (Source: http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=content.view&cpid=42#.U-yCi_ldVR4)
- GDP was $16,800 billion in 2013 (Source: https://www.globalcreditportal.com/ratingsdirect/showArticlePage.do?articleId=1330087&from=CR)
- So this is 2% of GDP.