Manifesto against positive incentives
on world poverty relief campaigns

Why are bands, ribbons, banners and songs campaigns ineffective?

How can we use the web2.0 set of rules to help Poverty Blindness?

There are countless campaigns against world poverty and almost all work the same manner; they ask you just to give a small contribution.

The wrong incentives

Thought their goals are just, the execution factor, on the common John Doe is wrong all the way: “Buy a small white band and you’ve done your duty.” “Stand-up and you’ve done your part”. “Put a banner on your site and you’re doing the right thing”.

What these actions are doing is making people feel good with themselves and sleep in peace at night. Having done practically nothing! In my opinion, campaigns should make people feel bad, not good. These campaigns are giving the wrong incentive!

As Steven Levitt correctly points out on his Freakonomics recent book:

A day-care center had a clearly stated policy that children were supposed to be picked up by 4 p.m. But very often parents were late. The result: at day’s end, they had some anxious children and at least one teacher who had to wait around for the parents to arrive. What to do? A pair of economists offered a solution: fine the tardy parents. Consequence? The number of late pickups promptly went…up! What was wrong? The fine was $3 and $3 is simply too small. For that price, a parent with one child could afford to be late every day. It substituted an economic incentive (the $3 penalty) for a moral incentive (the guilt that parents were supposed to feel when they came late). For just a few dollars each day, parents could buy off their guilt. Furthermore, the small size of the fine sent a signal to the parents that late pickups weren’t such a big problem. If the day-care center suffers only $3 worth of pain for each late pickup, why bother to cut short the tennis game? Indeed, when the $3 fine was eliminated, the number of late-arriving parents didn’t change. Now they could arrive late, pay no fine, and feel no guilt!

That’s how bad these campaigns are doing. Making people buy the guild for a crappy $3 rubber white band? And even worst, allowing people to brag with friends on how much they care about world poverty!

Poverty Blindness

In the golden years of the media, if you wanted to sell something, you just had to show it on the big mass media channels. Over time, people have developed Ad Blindness (On TV, Newspapers and even the Internet) and corporations are panicking and spending large sums of money to fight this furiously spreading “disease”. They are trying to find new ways to pass on the message, like viral campaigns and social networking. Why do you think Rupert Murdock bought MySpace?

Unfortunately, people have also developed “Poverty Blindness”. Admit it, how much does it affects you to see poor people from remote countries starving and dying from pain and hunger?

It’s time campaigns against world poverty realise this and start using the right tools!

One of the main reasons MySpace could very well be a key factor to save News Corp from this Blindness is custom made content. MySpace gets people attention because people are receiving information tailored made especially for them. (And by them)

How can we make use this on campaigns against world poverty and avoid “Poverty Blindness”? Just like MySpace, tailoring made it!

My proposal

So, how can we create something to give the right incentive, uses tailored made content and avoids “Poverty Blindness”?

In my vision of things there is another factor that needs to be added to the potion: persuasion. We need to force people to see images of poverty specially made for them.

Web 2.0 is about Freakonomics, The Power of the Crowds, The Long Tail, Folksonomy, Social Networks, Participation, Sharing, Mobility, Recommendations, Karma, Rankings and Trust.

Web 2.0 refers to a perceived or proposed second generation of Internet-based services that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users.

Making use of all those concepts, I present you my project: Forestage.org!

Child Sponsorship

In case you haven’t yet seen Jack Nicholson’s About Schmidt, go see it now, please!

The film begins with the retirement of Schmidt from his position as an actuary in an insurance company in Omaha, Nebraska. Schmidt finds it hard to adjust to his new life and feels useless and impotent. One evening, he is detachedly watching a television advertisement about a foster program for African children. He enters the sponsorship program and soon receives an information package with a photo of "his" foster child, a small Tanzanian boy named Ndugu, to whom he relates his life in self-centric letters.

The film's plot involves the children's charity "Childreach". Since 2002, the year of the film's release, the organisation has referenced the film and featured its poster in its literature for prospective child sponsors.

Fostering a children mean paying as low as $24 a month. The sponsorship will be helping make possible programs that respond to the sponsored child's most basic needs; programs that provide children and their families with better health, better education, safer homes, increased income and more.

Unlike many helping aid programs, and as portrayed on the About Schmidt movie, these programs have a marvellous quality: people who enter the sponsoring program are assigned a real child with a real name and a real face! And, besides the annual report, sponsors are given the opportunity to send letters and gifts to the child and visit the child in their village. And they get letters back also.

Visit this page from PlanUSA to know more.

Forestage.org

The Forestage.org project aim is to raise the number of poor children on fostering or sponsorship plans.

The only difference is how we want to do it. It’s as simple as this:

Instead of ONLY the people on sponsorship plans receiving the photos and reports from the child the sponsored, our goal is to have each house from the healthy neighbours to receive letters and reports from an assigned child!

Of course that, in case the sponsorship is not accepted, reports will, of course not be good. But that won’t keep us from sending them, month after month. A black letter? Oh, it means the child has died. No problem, here’s another one, do you still don’t want to sponsor?

Yes, we’re doing spam and using persuasion and dealing with shame and guilty sentiments. Yes, we pretend to have a map (thanks to Google maps) with houses painted on black where a child has not been sponsored and has died due to that. Imagine what your neighbour or your future employee will think about that?!

What? Is it unethical? Do you really want to know my reply to that? I don’t give a f*! Children are dying from starvation and in agonizing pain as we speak and you ask me about ethical questions?

When will we learn that our developed countries values can’t be used here everywhere? Democracy in Iraq rings the bell?

The other day I was watching a BBC documentary where an Iraqi doctor has shot a film inside a Baghdad hospital to show the violence seen there daily. In one the scenes that most impressed me, due to the shortage of film for diagnostic radiographies, a young kid caught on a bombing explosion, was being punched with an empty long needle all over the thorax and abdomen to find internal injuries, while four strong mans where holding his arms and legs. I still recall the horror expression from his eyes. I could not bear it anymore and changed channel. I ended up on ABC’s Extreme Makeover. For those who don’t know Extreme Makeover was a television program from ABC in which individuals volunteer to receive an extensive makeover. Borrowing heavily from the reality television genre, the show depicts real-life people undergoing an "extreme makeover" involving plastic surgery and exercise regimes assisted by a team of the best doctors on the best clinics available.

Now, you ask me about ethics?

See more on how we pretend to put this plan to work on our Forestage Phase II project.

Proximity

The key idea about the constant and updated flood of costume made content to rich citizens of this world of ours is to create the idea of proximity.

We believe no one on this world would let a children die from starvation just outside of his own house. So, and because communication technologies made the world a global village we want to use that concept and “virtual” bring one starving children to each door of each wealthy person of this world.

My Future dream

Once people paid their King and required protection back. Quote:”The feudal society was constructed for one reason: security.”

Now, as you know, government expends our money on a lot more. One being culture. Culture does not give you any essential survival necessity or tangible item, but it makes you feel good. This is something that would not make any sense on the Middle Ages. It was something we learned to enjoy and now require for a good living.

I dream of a distant future where every citizen from a developed country, besides their IRS contributions to their government, will also have their charity contribution according to their income grade.

I dream of the day, this contribution could be made across countries without politics getting in the way. I dream of the day people would do this as their world global citizen consciousness and without the need to suffer negative incentives or anything else.

For a moment, negative incentives are the best we can do to make people act!

Jose Augusto

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07.12.2006. 20:31

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