# A single child dies…

- Link: https://fundraising.co.uk/2009/02/28/single-child-dies/
- Published: 2009-02-28T12:00:50+00:00
- Author: John Baguley

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.

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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

 

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