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.

Carbon Capture Sucks the Big One

Everyone loses with carbon capture.

First, you and me Joe Taxpayer lose because Stephen Harper just announced he's going to plough millions into this speculative technology (for sucking CO2 out of fossil combustion) without bothering to give any economic value to carbon emissions. Duh. Without cap-and-trade or a national carbon tax, carbon emissions are still free, so how can carbon capture move from being an interesting lab experiment to a scaled-up, economically viable technology? It won't (see economist Mark Jaccard on this point). So research divisions of the fossil fuel companies, floating on fat public grants, win big, and... uh... you lose.

Meanwhile green groups like Greenpeace rail against carbon capture as the 'new nuclear debacle' -- by which they mean a pointless exercise in expensive technology when efficiency and renewables would do a better job. They happen to be right -- a coal-fired power plant outfitted with carbon capture would, for example, use up 30 to 40 percent of its energy output just to run the damn carbon capture process, so this technology actually has the potential to pointlessly increase carbon emissions. But.. I can't help thinking that a) Harper and his friends in Alberta (and, sigh... Washington) are going to fund experimental gizmos in this direction no matter what, and b) the world really needs Greenpeace to be focusing on the main event. Hello! You've got the tarsands in the bull's-eye in Canada and coal exports on the agenda in Australia, and you've got Barack Obama using the words 'carbon footprint' -- FOCUS my friends! FOCUS! Press the case for pricing carbon -- which every intelligent economist and policy wonk agrees with -- because it's the single most efficient, effective, and rapid way to stop carbon emissions from growing and start the necessary reductions.

But note: when we finally win policies to put a price on carbon, there is bound to be a plethora of viable ways to reduce emissions -- and that may just include carbon capture, which makes it even harder to stop because the very policies we need to protect our fragile atmosphere will give it the logic it needs to succeed. So there is very little mileage in building up public angst about it right now.

So to my friends in the green movement: Stick with actions to hurt the biggest, baddest, climate horrors, but don't get sidetracked by the built-in capitalist impulse to pour our wealth into new technology - after all, that's the impulse we want to harness for renewables, which are far more interesting to the public anyway.

Toddlers Worth More Than Their Weight as Economic Engines

What the heck is going on in Dalton McGuinty's office? I expect the federal Tories to be unapologetic about eliminating daycare spending - they have a social agenda and they are implementing it. Mums, back into the kitchen! And you kids, shut up and enjoy your povery, it build character! But McGuinty's non-committal response in the Leg to the resulting loss of 15,000 childcare spaces speaks volumes about where we are going in Ontario. His recent pronouncement that Ontario spends too much on social programs now looks more like a key plank in a deliberate right-wing platform rather than befuddled musings of a panicked Premier.

The trouble is, those toddlers and mums who will now fend for themselves instead of having quality early childhood education and a chance to work for their living are critical players in the economic recovery that both levels of government want to spur. Childcare subsidies -- like increased unemployment benefits -- go right into local goods and services, right away. Unlike the massive dolops of infrastructure spending to 'shovels in the ground', those dollars do not top up balance sheets at overstretched municipalities, but instead pay wages for people who buy coffee, diapers, and tickets to Ontario Place.

Those toddlers are worth a lot to us in this crisis, and this is no time to cut them out of the equation. I detect a social program in McGuinty's new direction, and it smells worse than a diaper-pail.