February 7, 2012

The Komen Foundation’s Even Bigger PR Problem

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Clara Jeffery has a piece today about the Komen Foundation and what they can do to recover from their Planned Parenthood fiasco, and it’s worth a read. But it reminded me of something I’ve been meaning to point out: one of the remarkable things about this controversy is that a lot of it hasn’t really been about the controversy itself. Rather, for a lot of people it seems like it was just a long-awaited excuse to finally blow up over their long-simmering dislike of the Komen Foundation and its seemingly endless commercialization of all things breast cancer related. I don’t really have much to say about this since I’m pretty removed from the whole thing, but one PR lesson Komen should learn is that apparently there’s long been a helluva lot of unvoiced annoyance/discontent/exasperation/anger/etc. toward the Komen Foundation among a lot of women. And now that it’s finally out, it’s going to be hard to stuff it back into its bottle. I wonder if they had any idea before this that they were so heartily disliked by so many people who — until now — just didn’t feel like it was OK to say so out loud?

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

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So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

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