Promoting Philanthropy

This summer, Serbian Philanthropy Forum officially launched this initiative by inviting companies and individuals to help association „Evo ruka“ start the first Inclusive centre in Zemun Polje. The centre is designed as open space in the community, where children with learning difficulties will be provided assistance and where people from Zemun Polje could spend quality time with their neighbours and children that need their support.
Initiative to collect funds took about three months, and was finished with a common volunteer action of arranging space in the Inclusive centre, where over 100 people participated.

As we wrote before, Philanthropy Posts’ new effort, the Catalyst initiative is following media in 7 countries in the region trying to work out ways to measure philanthropy. As we were looking into the data, we were interested to see what actions got the most media attention in each of the countries. This is an opportunity for you to see how media in your country view what is interesting for their audience:

Last week, I read the amazing story of a great joint philanthropic initiative in Kosovo that raised more than 400.000 euro in about 2 1/2 hours. It is an example how people from different sectors can work together and achieve great things.  The fundraising event was for the NGO Mother Theresa from Germany with proceeds going to provide needed medical treatments for sick children in Kosovo.  The event involved both a traditional gala dinner and a simultaneous live televised broadcast of the event on the public broadcaster RTK that solicited donations via SMS.  This event was completely supported by media partners.

Last week I had the opportunity to present some of the findings of media monitoring on philanthropy, on Annual Conference of PR Society of Serbia; the panel was exploring media relation toward CSR and corporate philanthropy. Though findings – some of which some were already shared here – seemed to confirm opinions of corporate PR experts (media are not that interested, they do not provide sufficient information etc.) presence of the “other side” made panel discussion really interesting. Zoran Stanojevic, editor and presenter of Oko Magazin, one of the Serbian Broadcasting Agency (RTS) TV shows with highest ratings shared his opinion:

 ‘Imagine media as a restaurant, where editor is maitre d’ and we, journalists are waiters; public is customer. So, restaurant needs to decide what should be offered –  a steak and potatoes and rich chocolate dessert or maybe a healthy meal such as kale or broccoli? Well, restaurant needs customers and to make money so it will offer the most attractive thing on the menu. Honestly – at least in the region – that would be steak and potatoes. Yes, broccoli is good, broccoli is healthy but… it’s still broccoli!”

In the first post, I’ve mentioned that there is a story behind the huge numbers of reports on philanthropy in the region. As a reminder:

“in app. 2,5 months there were over 1,100 reports on donations, actions and on giving…”

So what is the story about numbers, if we already counted reports?

Well, it turns out that all philanthropy is equal, but some is more equal than other :). That is, some actions/donations have repeated coverage, and number of reports ‘hides’ actual number of actions/donations presented. Chart shows the number of unique actions/donations that were presented in media.

Picking up on Nathan’s very good question about qualitative reporting of media and number of criteria that can be used for benchmarking the media reporting, I thought it might be good to share some of the observations and analysis I’ve done…

Overall, my impression was: lack of information. To show what I mean I’ll share my favorite report that I will quote it in full:

“Changing diabetes” is the name of the humanitarian race on which there were 200 people on Saturday”.

End of story. There is nothing about who organized it, why the race was humanitarian, how the money was raised, how the race will help to change diabetes… I mean, I can understand a lack of space, but really!

Of course, not all reports are like this; and, although – when doing an analysis – I haven’t thought of all Nathan’s criteria (will ask for help next time Nathan :)!), I’ll share what I have. To start with Nathan’s questions:

In the past couple of months I was busy doing media monitoring on philanthropy in several countries of the region. That is, I kept press clipping agencies busy with media monitoring and I was busy trying to make some sense of what I was receiving.

If anyone wonders why did I choose to spend time in this way, I was trying to understand more about standing of the local philanthropy in the region but also lack of success of civil society to receive stable funding from local sources (other than the government that is). So I thought, one of the ways we can get some objective view on philanthropy AND civil society and philanthropy is by following the media. In saying this, I perfectly understand that media often give anything but an objective view on something. However, media do shape public opinion