The end of charity

You never know what the outcome of a campaign is going to be. Creative work only is not a guarantee for success. It helps, but anything can still happen. The distribution of the products, the prize, the PR around the brand, trends, the salesmen and unforeseen influences can make or break the success of a campaign. For our Samsung/Pink Ribbon campaign, we had the bad luck that the phone wasn't in the store at the beginning of the campaign and thereby it lacked the kickstart that was so thoroughly planned with good PR-moments.

But now another unforeseen event threatens the course of the campaign. Recently, there's a lot of bad publicity around the anti-cancer organisation Pink Ribbon. The organisation mainly gets their money from sponsored initiatives by consumers and companies. All sorts of Pink Ribbon products are on the market. And only a small percentage of these revenues actually ends up at the charity organisation. Action groups are against this form of selling, saying that companies make use of the good name of Pink Ribbon and only sponsor it to make more money.

I think that you cannot blame an organisation like Pink Ribbon for this. They could have controlled the tidal wave of pink products a bit more, but they just see it as a smart way to get the hardly needed money for cancer research. Because how else are you going to get money? Nowadays, asking people nicely to donate isn't working anymore. Charities need to do something extra. That's why these annoying students walk around with a ringbinder at the stations to talk people into giving their bank account number. That's pure hard selling. Another way is to give something extra to people in return. A nice gift in trade for your donation; a magazine in trade for your membership.

But the most money is in the hands of the big corporations right now. If part of their revenue goes to charity and everybody is getting better from it, why not? In the case of the Pink Ribbon campaign: the counter is now on €100.000,- for the Pink Ribbon foundation, there's a lot of extra publicity to bring breast cancer under the attention of a broad audience, Samsung sells more phones and women are happy to have a nicely designed pink smartphone. I can't think of anything wrong with that. I think some people just can't accept that giving to charity is not an unconditional thing anymore.