A single child dies…
Howard Lake | 28 February 2009 | Blogs
Neatly encapsulating a fundraiser’s hardest dilemma: how are we to keep attention and giving focussed on a thousand deaths, when one will silence the Commons?
We all know it is the stories of individual beneficiaries that win much of our support, and to some extent come to stand for the larger numbers we help; but when it is so easy for Darfur or Congo or Gaza to slip from the public’s mind and list of priorities, how much easier is it to forget or just not notice the daily suffering around us.
Perhaps we do need a new organisation to calibrated the index of human misery, indeed “The Index of Human Misery” would be a depressing but apt title. Of course, we cannot say, “This cause is more deserving than that” in any agreed way, but perhaps we could keep alive the statistics; and before a hundred organisations tell me they do just that, let me say that is precisely the point. There is no central source for such information.
That would, however, still leave us fundraisers with the task of putting over a message to a humanity that ‘cannot bear too much reality’. One thing in which we can improve is to remember the great days of photo journalism and be bolder, more inventive and harder hitting in our use of imagery to reach past the media’s, and the public’s, forgetfulness. Didn’t those pictures of David Cameron and his child strike home?
John Baguley
www.internationalfundraisingconsultancy.com
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.