Badvertising, Bottled Water Edition

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Hey, if you were organizing a conference on water scarcity and climate change, would you give your speakers tap water or plastic bottles filled with water from a distant tropical island? At the [Michael] Milken Institute‘s global conference this week, organizers chose to do the latter, providing speakers with bottles of Fiji Water. The irony wasn’t lost on attendees: “At a Milken Global Conference panel on water supply. The speakers are all drinking Fiji bottled water. Aaaargh,” tweeted Paul Hyneck. Fiji, need we remind you, is an island where water supplies are scarce and locals have struggled to find clean, reliable supplies of drinking water. Meanwhile, Fiji Water owns the rights to the island’s largest underground aquifer, drawing water into its diesel-fueled factory and bottling it using heavy-weight plastic. All this makes having Fiji Water at a panel about “the most creative solutions being attempted to meet the water challenge in the United States and around the world” hard to swallow.

 

 

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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.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

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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