Grand Strategy: Quit Marketing, Start Communicating

Since I spend a lot of my professional life working with environmental and other non-profits to improve their communications, their campaigns, and their fundraising, I get to see up close the way that many of them are captured by the received wisdeom of the marketing profession - circa 1980. What I'm referring to is the commitment that most of our NGOs have to branding and market differentiation, both factors that lie behind successful fundraising.

But these factors do NOT lie behind successful social change, or at least they do not necessarily contribute to it. Instead, what makes effective campaigns and movements that change the world is a vibrant, rich, and dynamic relationship with the people who are affected by your cause and who support you the most. It's not about whether you are differentiated in the marketplace, but whether you offer a believable response to the oldest question in political discourse, 'what is to be done?', and that you engage those people in doing what you say should be done.

How credible is a movement whose main direct communication with its consituency is fundraising appeals packaged in myriad competing brands rather than a united program to change teh world?

Some individual organizations are doing a better job than others (see, for example, FarmStart, an important innovator in the sustainable food movement), but the lack of what most people in most eras of the modern industrialized world would recognize as a coordinated program with political, legal, and social dimensions hampers our efforts.

But this griping on my part isn't getting me very far with my green friends. Most of them are worrying about revenue shortfalls as a result of the recession, which is making them redouble their efforts in what I consider a secondary direction.

So, as part of my quest to see things in a new light, I offer here a perspective labeled 'radical collaboration' which I found in a post by Adele Peters on worldchanging.org. This approach offers insights from big business on how collaboration between organizations can be made to work even when competition remains an important context in which they must operate.

A recent initiative of Creative Commons is a case n point -- Green Xchange brings together a number of major consumer products corporations (including Nike and BestBuy) to share research and practice in energy efficiency, waste management, and 'greening' their supply chains. This field -- referred to incorrectly as 'sustainability' in the corporate world -- is now seen by some mainstream analysts (see July/09 issue of the Harvard Business Review) as the most important driver of technological and business process innovation in market economies today, so there is evidence that some of the biggest economic entities on the planet are moving past greenwashing to actual behaviour modification.

A certain amount of cross-pollination goes on between the larger environmental groups, obviously, and grassroots groups are always flowing into and out of one another. But a systematic effort to collaborate through matching competencies for a more powerful agenda of social change? I don't see it, I'm afraid.

Yeah, right

The Starbucks in the departures lounge at Ottawa Airport gets my vote for corporate wanker-ism. I ordered a 'short' coffee (that's a small size in old-speak)and the woman at the cash told me that the register "doesn't have a key for short - so, uh, I have to charge you for a Tall." So I took a pic of my - literally - overpriced coffee, and here it is.

Fish in my backyard

A fantastic event has taken root at my neighbourhood community centre in downtown Toronto, and it involves a swimming pool, children, worms, and a lot of trout. That's right, every June a fishing frenzy takes place in the Scadding Court swimming pool, where the chlorinated blue water is replaced with freshwater grey, stocked with fish.

My kids love it. My son even landed the biggest fish in the pool, after an hour of fruitless casting, but I was so excited I forgot to snap the moment on my cellphone camera.

Originally started up to help immigrant Chinese families 'get back in touch' with their angling roots, the Gone Fishin' event now pulls in all kinds of people from the intensely multicultural downtown-west community in which the Centre is located - Jamaican and Haitian families join the older Anglo population alongside the Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese folks, incongruously assisted by half a dozen teenagers in red-and-white LIFEGUARD outfits and a phlegmatic middle-aged white fisherman straight out of central casting ('you want a worm? Alright, alright...')

For 2 dollars you can fish for an hour and if you catch something, 75 cents will get your fish cleaned by a friendly young man in the basement kitchen. You can even take it upstairs to the snack bar in the main lobby, opposite the gymnasium, to have it fried up with rice and beans.

Our Great Lakes are still vilified and feared for their toxic menace, which means that very few Torontonians have any relationship at all to the unique local ecosystem we live in. This community fishing event is a good way to start teaching us about our natural heritage, one morsel at a time.

Will Nuclear Free Thinking Spread to the Arctic?

President Obama announcement today that he has reached agreement with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev to further reduce the two countries' nuclear weapons stockpiles. Weapons of mass destruction have no place in a world that calls itself 'civilized' and we are seeing again in this announcement the sea-change in political life that now allows us all to think such rational thoughts.

Disarmament campaigners have for years made the case that until the 'official' nuclear weapons states (Russia, the US, UK, France and China) control their addiction to nukes, no one else who covets them (Iran, Iraq, Isreal, India, Pakistan, etc) will be the slightest bit interested in even talking about, let alone actually, getting rid of theirs. You say we can't have nuclear weapons? how come they formt a central pillar of your foreign policy? (Beyond this rationale, the 'official' weapons states are also bound by the Non-Proliferation Treaty to move toward total nuclear disarmament, and unless they do there are concerns that this treaty will simply collapse for lack of legitimacy in the global South.)

Now Obama and Medvedev are applying that logic, and explicitly hoping to influence discussions in the Middle East, where constant flareups of violence look ever more ominous as the 'unofficial' nuclear arsenals of the beliigerents (including Isreal) grow.

Let's take this another step though, and not just put pressure on Mideast nations, but actually model steps to total nuclear disarmament. Russia and the US can take the lead on a treaty to impose a permanent ban on nuclear weapons (and nuclear-powered vessels) in the Arctic region. This area is turning into a geopolitical hotspot in its own right, what with all that oil under the ice and that ice disappearing faster than you can say 'catastophic climate change'.

Our own Canadian hawk, PM Stephen Harper, has repeatedly rattled his little sabre about Canadian sovereignty in the North, and a major public debate about the future of this region is long overdue.

Michael Ignatieff, are you listening?

Here's a major foreign policy angle for you to outflank Mr Harper (as you've failed to do on the Arctic since you won the Liberal leadership earlier this year) - Canada pressing for a nuclear free Arctic would be credible internationally, it would strengthen, not weaken, our claims to the North, and it would prove difficult for Mr Harper to follow suit since his own base finds that kind of policy shift both unappealing and untenable (they still think that Harper's Arctic rhetoric is based in military thinking).

It would also give Mr Ignatieff the chance to speak truth to Mr Obama while at the same time directly engaging the other Arctic nations (in addition to Russia and the US - Iceland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland), and making a practical proposal that would echo very powerfully in the Middle East. Obama would then have another international plank to build the scaffold around Isreal and Iran, pressuing THEM to consider a nuclear-free Middle East.

This would be a big improvement on Mr Ignatieff's ridiculous preening about Arctic issus so far, which have been a laughable imitation of Harper's hawkishness (see the 23.1.09 Arctic post here on NC). As such, such a move by Ignatieff would raise all the right sentiments about the Liberal Party among centrist Canadian voters - nuclear disarmament is not a leftwing issue, after all.

As we've all been saying, that Obama sure does open up possibilities, doesn't he? If only the rest of the geopolitical class was as bold.

Shocker! Local food movement sideswiped by free markets!

'Locavorism' and Slow Food and the whole effort to decouple our quality of life from the ever-growing risks of globalized industrial capitalism cannot survive in open free-market conditions.

It is no surprise that this reality affects entrepreneur-cum-activist chef Jamie Kennedy as much as anyone else. The Toronto restauranteur and champion of the local food movement recently told The Globe & Mail newspaper, “I'm losing money because embracing the local food movement where costs are inherently higher, is challenging" (go here for the Globe & Mail's breathless take on his business fortunes).

That is the nature of the marketplace - it will systematically undervalue environmental integrity, human health, and all forms of exchange that do not produce profits at some point in the cycle. That is one of the keys to lower prices, which itself is a key to consumer behaviour.
It's a myth and a misleading canard to think that changing our world is mainly a matter of consumers being more 'ethical', or that only cultural change will do the job - the regulation of markets is critical as well. Parmasan cheese does not survive in Italy as a way of life because consumers are so motivated about it (though they are) but rather because protectionism around the cheese producers is coupled with attentiveness to local tastes and preferences to create a 'sheltered' food oasis.

Once we recognize that the free market will not deliver what we want and need in our food system, we can then turn our attention to crafting fair and reasonable constraints that will support local producers and benefit consumers with healthier, sustainable alternatives to the global food industry.

Here at home, we only need to look at how excellent community organizations like FoodShare manage to do what they do - with middle-class engagement around social needs, to be sure, but also with government subsidies to deliver the services Torontonians want. No free market will do that on its own -- not here, and not anywhere.

What's with all this &#$@!& stuff?!?

Activist and educator Anne Leonard, who I knew in my early-'90s Greenpeace days, has been getting some major press lately on her excellent little video 'The Story of Stuff'.

This rip-roaring overview of the dark side of consumerism has been a popular online tool since it launched in December, 2007. I use it in my courses at the Ontario College of Art & Design (OCAD) where its cheerful, opinionated style matches the psychic energy of the students.

Since the crisis of international capitalism struck last fall, it has powered its way into the mainstream culture through mass media coverage. Which may go to show that the hunger for 'content' (stuff to push through media channels) sometimes serves the hunger for substance (in public policy and culture).

Now Annie is preparing a book version of the project and she has already launched numerous non-English versions of the video. Check out her blog as well, for an ongoing discussion of how to reduce our bruising impact on Mother Earth.

Torture Us No More America

How much scarier can America get? Now there's a partisan fight breaking out between Democrats and Republicans over treatment of top Bush Administration officials who authorized 'coercive' interrogation techniques in their 'war on terror'. Many of us are worried that this political storm could engulf Obama's ambitious agenda, knocking desperately needed action on climate, healthcare and banking regulation off into a second term (aka The Wild Blue Yonder).

The torture issue could also have an impact on Obama's foreign policy if he sidesteps what many view as a clear case of illegality by some agents of the United States. Spanish prosecutors may end up doing what he will not - prosecute the decision-makers behind these misdeeds, and in the process undermine the amazing amount of goodwill he has inspired around the world.

Americans need to grapple with the political meaning of the torture allegations, just as much -- or more -- than the legal and moral implications. The deep-rooted sense of 'exceptionalism' that teaches many in the United States to see their democracy's laws as inherently superior to international law lays traps for the nation's foreign policy into which even President's of Mr Obama's intelligence can fall.

A nation that valorizes, even reifies, individual liberty to the extent that America does has to extend those liberties universally - not because it is a moral affront to say that American liberties are more valuable than those of an Egyptian, or a Canadian -- but because if America is an exception to the rule of international law, praise be the gods, so are we all. Like the legitimation of nuclear weapons because you're The Good Guys, believing it's okay to take away liberties of life and limb because you are the defenders of liberty negates the political legitimacy that is at the root of your claim. In the international sphere, political claims are increasingly founded on moral consistency, a fact that is a fact no matter how exceptional you may think you are.

It would be more valuable to Americans, and to us all, if the country spent time deliberating on the meaning of this fact as it pertains the country's foreign policy. How are one's particular interests to be advanced if one cleaves to a strong moral code of universal human rights? This is an interesting question for a superpower, an edifying question.

And a question that would, in all likelihood, be submerged and silenced if a show trial of the 'Bush Six' were to proceed. For Mr Obama - the right path is probably political and historical inquiry, not legal mumbo-jumbo.

(For a legal interpretation from the international standpoint, check out this article from The New Yorker in which the views of my old friend (and QC) Philippe Sands are featured. He is spearheading efforts to charge members of the Bush administration with war crimes under international law.)

The New Action Orientation

The appointment of Phillip G. Radford as the new Executive Director of Greenpeace in the United States marks a critical and decisive step toward constituency-based activism for the iconic green group. It also marks a move to empower a younger generation of campaigners who are fired up by the climate crisis and who were central to the Obama victory last November.

Radford, 33, is credited as Greenpeace's top grassroots organizer in the US, an experienced fundraiser and political activist with a reputation for focusing on measurable campaign outcomes. His arrival in the organization is recent -- 2003 -- but his impact has been significant. When I took over as Chair of the Board in 2000, Greenpeace in the US was a shadow of its former self: Self-absorbed, drifting, shrinking in stature, and bereft of strong, effective campaigns. Radford was part of the team (which included outgoing ED John Passacantando, Campaign Director Lisa Finaldi, and Ops Director Ellen McPeake, among others) that rebuilt the street-level presence and credibility that Greenpeace has always depended on to make its daring high-profile protests resonate in the living rooms of the nation. Into the bargain, the group has doubled its fundraising and invested heavily in the new American youth movement (through fellowships, mobilizing drives, and a quasi-militaristic foot canvass in dozens of cities). (Go here for the NYT story on Radford's appointment)

Among the big international green groups, Greenpeace takes the strongest stands, and -- contrary to the expectations which that might elicit -- gets the most done. That has been true around the world but hard to claim for the American wing since the early 1990s -- until now.

Old-timers in the rest of the Greenpeace world (and they are legion) may be nervous that the direct action roots of the group are disappearing under the thicket of grassroots lobbying tactics that Radford represents. But in America today, power is the sound of millions of feet on pavement, and that is where Greenpeace USA is finding its strength and inspiration.

(Go here for a vast compendium of high quality images of Greenpeace's past work.)

BlinkThink/NYT

A quick update on our first posting. David Brooks had a good little synopsis in the NYT last week of the link between morality, evolution, and the kind of 'snap judgement' that Malcolm Gladwell documented in Blink (and which I denounced). He argues that 'moral' behaviour -- cooperation, altruism, selflessness -- are hard-wired because evolutionary pressures makes them advantageous over the long run. That competitive individualism is not the only 'natural' urge is not news -- Marx noted this in response to the rip-off artists who wanted Darwin to be the mouthpiece for social privelege, and anyone who's been on a movie set knows that life as we know it halts without a division of labour -- but the insight here is that over time, our brains have moved this understanding deep down into our involuntary reactions, so morality is more like an instantaneous aesthetic judgement than a chain of logical inference. BlinkThink is not so bad after all, according to this way of looking at it.

Interesting, but we still need to respect the findings of the Rwanda genocide study first noted in this blog on January 21, 2009.

What makes some campaigns tick better than others?

Okay try this powerpoint about the sources of effectiveness in advocacy campaigns, and please let me know your critical thoughts and ideas on it. It dates from 2006, so I have not doubt my own understanding has changed, but it was a genuine 'stab' at analyzing why advocacy works sometimes and not others. cheers.