Benjamin Norman for The New York Times
CHARITABLE PIPELINES A concert for Hurricane Sandy victims this month at Madison Square Garden will donate its “net proceeds.”
In 1983, Jerry Welsh, an executive vice president at American Express, observed from his Lower Manhattan office that the Statue of Liberty was undergoing a major renovation. Within a short time, the company inaugurated an advertising campaign promoting its interest in the project: For every new credit card application, American Express would donate one dollar to the statue’s restoration; for every transaction, it would contribute one penny. Eventually, the effort raised $1.7 million. As Mara Einstein, a professor of marketing at Queens College, explains in her recent book, “Compassion Inc: How Corporate America Blurs the Lines Between What We Buy, Who We Are and Those We Help,” this was essentially the beginning of what is known as cause marketing.
That the practice has found some of its most aggressive expression in the aftermath of natural disasters is surely obvious to anyone who has observed the second and third chapters of Hurricane Sandy, as businesses have gone about the yoked work of advancing their interests while igniting charitable impulses, occasionally to unseemly, or at the very least, utterly confounding, effect. Last week, for instance, an obscure company called VenueBook, which offers online party planning, announced that from now through Dec. 31, it would donate 15 percent of its “proceeds” to City Harvest, which has worked to help feed storm victims.
“For New Yorkers hosting holiday parties, this is the best way to give back to those in need after Sandy,” VenueBook’s chairman, Kelsey Recht, said in a news release, providing no apparent basis for the claim. As it happens, VenueBook is giving a percentage of the commission it receives from the event sites to City Harvest, but there is no real indication that using the company as a charitable pipeline would be more beneficial than discreetly asking every guest at your buffet table to please put $5 in a ceramic Santa that could then be sent to a relief agency.
The offer of a donation made in terms of a percentage of proceeds has become a familiar pitch, and it is one that arouses the profound irritation of people like Professor Einstein and the economist Patrick M. Rooney, monitors of the philanthropic world, precisely because the phrase itself is subjective and vague. (In the case of an operation like VenueBook, it is especially so, because the event-planning service is free to consumers.) Generally, “proceeds” could refer to a percentage of sales, or a percentage of profits or perhaps whatever an organization has decided it ought to mean.
For its Concert for Sandy Relief, to be held at Madison Square Garden on Dec. 12, the Robin Hood Foundation says in its promotion that “net proceeds” from the event will go to its relief fund. While there is, despite the temptation, very little cause to be cynical of such an affair — the foundation, the hedge fund industry’s successful charity to combat poverty in New York City, has already provided more than $8 million in grants to 90 groups assisting hurricane victims — the term “net proceeds,” still fails to convey what a ticket buyer might actually be giving. It seems more specific, but it really isn’t. Not knowing what it costs to produce the event, you have no idea whether it would be more efficient to write a check for $200 to a charity and stay home.
Similarly, if you went to the clothing sale held by the Council of Fashion Designers of America last month to benefit storm victims, where 100 percent of net proceeds went to the Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City, you would have had little idea what the size of your contribution was, unless you were given spreadsheets from Marc Jacobs or Alexander McQueen or Chloé delineating exactly how much was spent to produce the sweaters you were buying.
By measure of transparency, something along the lines of what the Brooklyn restaurant Junior’s has done is laudable: It donated $5 of every pumpkin cheesecake it sold this fall to the Brooklyn Community Foundation, which has raised $1.5 million to date for those affected by the storm.
The risk with this sort of consumer altruism, of course, is that it alleviates us of responsibility — we feel we’ve done good by purchasing a dessert or a tank top or yoga class when we might have done considerably better. What is most noteworthy about the charitable efforts surrounding Hurricane Sandy is that while they seem to have infiltrated nearly every aspect of our consumer lives, they haven’t raised all that much money in relative terms.
According to data from Indiana University’s Center on Philanthropy, three weeks after the storm, $219 million had been collected. Comparatively, at the same point, after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, $1.3 billion had been raised; at the same point after the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004, $610 million. The figure for the 2010 earthquake in Haiti was $752 million.
One explanation for this disparity is that donors presumably have been less moved to help victims who seem largely middle class and white — the residents of Staten Island, Breezy Point in Queens and the Jersey Shore — than they were to assist broader communities of the poor in New Orleans and abroad. Companies that make too big a show of ginning up money for Hurricane Sandy actually risk seeming exploitive in the name of the cause that has less support than they might have imagined. It hardly has to be said that there is enormous need in this city, and everywhere, including repairing the ravages of the storm. It doesn’t take a weatherman to see which way the misery goes.
Big City: Hurricane Sandy Donations — 15 Percent of What?
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Big City: Hurricane Sandy Donations — 15 Percent of What?
