Subject: RE: BS: Need info about the Red Cross
From:
wysiwyg
Date: 26 Sep 05 - 09:40 AM
I think I am the only former chapter manager posting in this thread. I do have info to share, and I prefer to be ASKED for it rather than atttacked into it. Want to know how it actually works? Good Lord, ASK me instead of applying aversion therapy so I don't even want to read your misinformation!!
The Red Cross got into trouble over its fundraising practices over 9/11, yes. Before (or apparently since) 9/11, most people never knew that a donation must be designated as restricted in order for it to BE restricted. If one watches the disaster ads carefully, one will see that the ads never SAY the disaster shown will be the only disaster the money goes for. IMO this is a wrong approach, but it WAS undertaken to build funds for future victims, and I know this for a fact. Still, IMO it was an approach that should have been articulated long before 9/11. I can tell you this-- the organization paid dearly for it, and it's people who NEED the services who got hurt, far beyond any one disaster. Here's why--
At the time of 9/11, the whole US org had been restructuring. It was the tail end of a comprehensive strategic plan mandated and led by Mrs. Dole, tho by the time 9/11 played out she had moved on. In this planning process, the org's place in the world of charities was studied in depth.
One of the first things learned was that people considered it the most trusted name among charities, and that people would donate far more than they HAD been donating, if only they were asked. So national started learning HOW to ask, effectively. By the time I became a chapter manager in 1997, direct mail was bringing in a large amount of money and chapters took on new life in actually delivering the services that the org had become chartered to provide, on a much larger scale.
Our county's failing chapter actually was able to get its head above water for the first time in about 40 years.
One way the funds could be raised effectively, we learned from research, was to show people the face of tragedy and to plan ahead financially at all times for the NEXT disaster. As a result, the national org became much better able to deploy volunteers and money very quickly, into large-scale disasters. Chapters were expected to be able to raise part of the money themselves, for disasters the national org had historically been funding from monies provided in part by the chapter assessments somone slammed, upthread (inaccurately)-- it isn't that a chapter pays $1,000 to carry the name, it's that chapters can only exist as units of a larger effort, and can't act as loose cannons doing only those services they like to do.
Money flows from local to national and back to local, when most needed. For example, the chapter funds the first expenses of opening a shelter, but national money soon kicks in for shelter costs and for individual recipients' vouchering. Then the local chapter goes into fundraising mode to replenish its own local disaster fund, first, and also to contribute to the national disaster fund.
Another learning, around that strategic planing process, was that the white-glove, upper-class image of the leadership pool was keeping the org from meeting real needs. A dedicated effort was undertaken to change the demographics of the volunteer pool. By the time I became a staff member in 1997, it was in full swing in all five lines of service. This more hands-on approach had percolated upstream to the extent that my regional director was himself a real "man-of-the- people" type who understood local urgencies to a fine point.
Another learning was that chapters needed to work with government in a structure that mirrored gummint structures-- chapters needed to be organized along county and state lines, not otherwise. However, at the same time, it was recognized that no chapter could remain a local private club-- it had to do business with sound business management and it had to stand on its own feet and not cry to national every time someone hiccuped. So some chapters began, on their own initiative at first, to consolidate, merge, enlarge.
People who could get things DONE rose to chapter leadership in chapters that could handle a wider area. Small chapters like ours (budget wise) were then encouraged, by national policy, to hook up with larger nearby chapters at least for pooling accounting staff.
IMO this was a mistake-- all of us make those, and in planning one does not always know all the pieces to factor into the plan. While I still staffed a local chapter locally, many of my colleagues and I could see that as chapters lost their strictly-local identity, donors became wary of giving money that they felt would go beyond the local level.
All these factors came together in the worst way with 9/11. The ads seemed to say the money would go to NYC. The FR policy had never been made widely enough known. Red Cross handled the FR around 9/11 just like they had with other large-scale disasters, not realizing the amount of feeling and scrutiny and suspicion that would become part of the nation's culture as a result of having been attacked directly.
On top of this, the gummint named them the org to handle monies and programs they had never handled before, had never had as part of their charter, and some things got mixed up. (I don't say more than that because I don't know the details well enough to describe them-- I had moved on in 2000.)
Local FR dried up and then, the smallest chapters HAD to merge with the larger ones. In our county, this means that there is no one local to know about local school shootings, no one local to know how to work with the local fire companies to get word when there's a family burnt out in a housefire (that's POLITY), no one knows the HS principals well enough to know how to finesse communications over difficult issues involving kids going off to join the Army when some pregnant teen mom wants to find her baby's daddy who has fled our poor economy to the only job he can find-- in a uniform. No one local knows the other local service orgs well enough to turn out a really good blood drive.
When you actively slam the organization-- that's what you are hurting. Not some well-paid national staffer (they are all overworked), but the neighbor who will need clothing, blood, and food. Don't donate, OK-- hey, I don't either-- but it's not necessary to slam them.
I get "crabby" about it because I spent three very stressful and difficult years in the trenches, paid just above minimum wage, to prevent our chapter from folding, only to see it fold anyway a few years later because the delicate networks of support I was able to grow, in my tenure, collapsed in 9/11 acrimony. I had two kids in the service at the time, and I saw the gap in services when we had a family emergency and had a lot of trouble using the Red Cross communication services. But it also made me really resent people who trash the fine work people and the org DO do, instead of stepping forward to make it better during that time we worked so hard to make our local chapter fly.
I really don't think I am having a tantrum, tho-- I am trying to describe a reality some of you have buried under a layer of uninformed bullshit.
Carol, when you first described the lack of service in NOLA, you didn't say it was about safety. It just happens we were away, camping, as Katrina hit, with no news at all for several weeks of aftermath. We have not been able to follow the news as closely as you obviously feel you have, since we got back. I responded with what I know about business as usual in the org, and I spoke not of POLITICS but of POLITY-- there is a distinction and I used the word with intention. Once you clarified your concern, I responded with what I know to be policy. Don't be so quick to include me in your suspicion about an attempt to cover something up-- I just didn't know, when I first posted, what you were talking about, because you didn't SAY what you were talking about.
I wasn't in NOLA to accurately know what led to the decisions made-- I just have a base of actual experience working from the inside. But Carol, you weren't there, either-- isn't possible that BOTH factors-- policy and polity-- went into a decision that people have not been in a position to understand?
~S~
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sj
