The brand of a nonprofit organization can be worth billions of dollars. Amnesty International has one the world’s most trusted brands. So does WWF. In Europe, both Amnesty and WWF have ranked among the top five most trusted brands in the annual Edelman Public Relations survey, right beside industry titans such as Microsoft and Michelin. Overall trust of NGO brands in the 2012 Edelman survey was ahead of business and the media – and far ahead of governments. For five straight years (2007–12) NGOs have managed to top the Edelman survey as “the most trusted institution in the world.”
Brand recognition and trust of an advocacy organization can rival the McDonald’s M or the Nike swoosh. A trusted brand helps NGOs to recruit volunteers. It opens doors to policymakers and the media. And it enhances their legitimacy within communities. A trusted brand helps as well with door-to-door fundraising and corporate sponsorships. Big-brand companies have little interest in partnering with a no-name NGO. They seek out NGOs with “super brands” to strengthen trust and legitimacy of the corporate brand.1
Back in the 1960s most activists were meeting in classrooms or living rooms or churches. Most advocacy groups were casual and self-governing, with volunteers running campaigns. Activists strived to alter mindsets and embarrass firms and pressure governments. Even back then, many activists could see the value of fundraising to achieve these goals, especially as more and more causes began to compete for fewer and fewer high-profile news slots. Yet few, if any, 1960s activists would have foreseen the coming of NGOs with hundreds of millions of dollars in assets, thousands of staff, and CEOs with performance bonuses, all working through top-down bureaucracies to maintain a brand.
Who, fifty years ago, would have thought that one day most of the world’s human rights and environmental activists would be marketing causes and reporting back to corporate donors? Who would have thought frontline activists would be fired for refusing to conform to a management culture of efficiency? Or defend the brand image? Or demonstrate a return on donations?
Institutions filter the ideas and objectives of activists, shaping how and why movements carry on and limiting what aims and tactics activists see as valid and realistic.2 For us, the process of institutionalization, although definitely changing the nature of activism, does not lead to its demise.3 Taking this view, much of the world’s activism now occurs inside NGOs working to pay for salaries and offices and with guiding approaches of strategic compromise with states and business (although NGO executives may well tell street-level members otherwise).
Establishing and running these NGOs has in no way been a constant or linear progression within social movements or across political jurisdictions. Nor has the process of aligning advocacy goals and methods with bureaucratic institutions been smooth or unopposed. The history of the institutionalization of activism is rife with rancor and resentment. Resistance has been common. So has the rise of counter-movements.
Some activists have put a high priority on building global organizations, such as mainstream environmentalists in North America and Europe. Others have focused on gaining legal rights and equality, along with positions in state agencies, such as the women’s movement in Australia. Still others, as is the case of the Occupy movement so far, have rejected institution-building. The pace of institutionalization has therefore been much faster for some social movements and slower and more uneven in others.
At the same time, the bureaucratizing of activism within international NGOs is integrating community groups into advocacy organizations as stakeholders and partners. This process is not, however, subsuming all grassroots advocacy or kitchen-table politicking. In both the global South and North such activism remains an energetic force – a trend we would not expect to change as new causes arise and old ones fade. If anything, we expect direct-action activism could well spread, as community groups mobilize to resist the growing supremacy of international NGOs (and the accompanying fundraising and market values).
The process of institutionalization, then, is fragmenting some social movements, alienating some activists, and eliciting at least some grassroots backlash. Still, over the last half-century this process has been resolutely shifting the scope, actions, and strategies of much of the world’s activism toward a common look and feel. This change has opened multiple channels for corporatization. Looking and acting more like a company has made it easier and more logical for activists to cooperate with corporations. The more they cooperate, the more activists have tended to emulate the management culture, market orientation, administrative ranks, and accounting practices of firms. This circular dynamic helps to explain the rapid increase in corporate funding and NGO–corporate partnerships over the last decade, adding to the steadily growing revenue stream of ever expanding multinational NGOs.
Trust in brands such as “Amnesty” or “Greenpeace” arises in part from a belief that these organizations are nothing like a company. Profits are not a goal; altruism and goodwill rule. Such an image is at the heart of most NGO brands. Yet the Greenpeace of today looks far more like a traditional multinational company than like its underground, at times unruly, origins of the 1960s and 1970s. As chapter 1 shows, Amnesty International, Greenpeace, and WWF are all examples of groups evolving from informal networks of activists into international bureaucracies. All of them are also tigers in defense of brand identity and value. In 2000, WWF even went as far as suing the World Wrestling Federation for using the acronym “WWF,” forcing the federation to modify its name (in 2002 it became World Wrestling Entertainment, or WWE).
Amnesty International, Greenpeace, and WWF are just three of the thousands of branded NGOs now operating globally. Another example is Oxfam International, a confederation of seventeen organizations working across more than ninety countries with over 5,000 employees. Every month hundreds of thousands of people donate to Oxfam, and tens of thousands volunteer to help with campaigns to reduce poverty and combat emergencies in developing countries. To raise further funds, in the UK alone Oxfam runs more than 700 charity-stores, selling, among other items, secondhand books and clothes and toys.4
A smaller but telling example of the institutionalization of advocacy into an international organization is the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), founded in 1969 by Brian Davies to stop what he felt was an inhumane hunt for harp seal pups off the east coast of Canada. Through the 1970s IFAW took direct action to disrupt and expose what it saw as the “brutality” of the hunt. Cooperating with Greenpeace, Davies and his close-knit team won one of the greatest animal rights victories of all time when outrage in Europe led to a ban on young seal pelt imports, effectively ending the “commercial hunt” of seal pups in the 1980s. Just seven staff worked at IFAW in 1979 when Davis moved its headquarters from Fredericton, New Brunswick, to Cape Cod, Massachusetts. By the time Frederick O’Regan succeeded Davies in 1997, more than seventy employees were working at the Cape Cod office.
Today, Azzedine Downes, as president and CEO of IFAW, leads a global team of hundreds of veterinarians, scientists, administrators, and rescue workers, with eight offices outside of the United States and projects in more than forty countries. IFAW runs a host of educational and scientific campaigns for elephants, whales, dogs, and cats, among others. Rescuing “individual” animals is now a big part of “success.” So is providing veterinary care. One of the fund’s biggest successes of 2010–11, explains the IFAW board chair in his opening statement for the IFAW Annual Report, was having “brought vet care to almost 85,000 cats and dogs in impoverished communities around the world.” Revealingly, this report brings up sealing only a few times. And it fails even to mention that, in many years since restarting in the mid-1990s, the commercial seal hunt in Canada has been even bigger than it was in the 1970s.5
Total public support and revenue in fiscal year 2012 to back IFAW’s more mainstream message and programming was roughly US$100 million. This is an impressive amount for an “animal rights” organization. Some nonprofit organizations, however, turn over forty to fifty times that.
The United Way network, the world’s biggest privately funded nonprofit organization, raised US$5.14 billion in 2011. Habitat for Humanity International’s support and revenue that year was at US$1.5 billion; the Nature Conservancy was at US$1.17 billion; World Vision was at US$1.06 billion; the US branch of Save the Children was at US$619 million; and Susan G. Komen for the Cure was at US$439 million. These organizations also hold additional millions (and sometimes billions) of dollars in assets, including investments, real estate, and landholdings.6
The revenue and assets of Greenpeace, Amnesty, and WWF, as chapter 1 documents, also reach into the hundreds of millions of dollars. The US branch of Greenpeace alone saw revenues in 2010 of nearly US$27.8 million.7 Tens of thousands of smaller NGOs are also turning over millions of dollars in revenue annually. Since the 1990s the business of running nonprofit organizations has been thriving. In the United States, for example, the revenues and assets of nonprofit organizations “grew robustly” from 2000 to 2010, especially among the increasing numbers of environmental and internationally focused NGOs.8
The US has at least 2.3 million nonprofit organizations (roughly 1.6 million of which file tax returns); India has at least 1 million NGOs (and possibly more than 3 million). Variable definitions of “nonprofit” and “nongovernmental,” along with the common practice of using these terms interchangeably, make it hard to chart the worldwide increase in the number of these organizations.9 Estimates of the growth in the number of NGOs with an international focus give some sense of the speed and extent of increase since 1990: from about 6,000 in 1990 to 26,000 in 1996 to over 50,000 today (with the UN accrediting thousands of these NGOs to attend international negotiations).10
Such a rapid increase means that thousands of international NGOs and millions of local and national ones now compete for funds. NGO presidents and CEOs, especially those leading global organizations, are increasingly turning to corporate funding and partnerships to run and build their institutions.
Corporations, corporate foundations (e.g., the Nike Foundation), and corporate-affiliated foundations (e.g., the Ford Foundation) are increasingly funding nongovernmental activities across both the global North and South. One example is the International Youth Foundation, which receives financial support from corporate-affiliated foundations such as the Ford Foundation and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, as well as directly from companies such as Microsoft, Nokia, and Nike. Even more revealing, in 2010 about 11 percent of WWF Network’s €525 million operating budget came from corporations (with another 6 percent from foundations and trusts). Global financial turmoil during 2010 caused a decline in WWF income from trusts, governments, and donors. Yet strong investment returns allowed its overall budget to increase by 18 percent from the previous year (an increase of €81 million, or about US$106 million).11
Corporations gave US$14.5 billion in 2008 to nongovernmental charitable organizations in the United States. Corporate foundations also distribute large sums to nonprofit organizations. The Coca-Cola Foundation, for instance, which is the ninth biggest corporate foundation in the United States, with assets of US$244 million at the beginning of 2012, handed out US$273 million between 2002 and 2010. The biggest is the Goldman Sachs Foundation, with assets at the start of 2012 of US$561 million, followed by the Wells Fargo Foundation, with assets at the start of 2012 of US$531 million.12
Corporate-affiliated foundations are an even bigger source of NGO funding. The US has over 76,000 grant-making foundations with assets totaling more than US$620 billion – at least sixty-five of which have assets of over US$1 billion. At the top sits the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, with assets at the beginning of 2011 of over US$37 billion. The Ford Foundation and J. Paul Getty Trust are distant second and third, each with assets in 2011 of around US$10.5 billion. These foundations are certainly not puppets of corporations. Yet increasingly they are demanding institutional efficiencies, business accounting practices, and a return on “investments” (i.e., grants). Many foundations, too, want to see NGOs working with business partners to “leverage” funding.13
In the United Kingdom corporations donate approximately £1.6 billion (about US$2.45 billion) a year to charities. As elsewhere, corporations in the UK also provide in-kind support, employee expertise and time, marketing advice, and free legal counsel. Non-cash donations account for roughly one-third of corporate giving, although they are arguably more significant than direct financing for spurring along the corporatization of activism. Top UK donors (within the UK as well as globally) include the multinational pharmaceutical companies AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKline, the multinational retailers Tesco and Marks & Spencer, the mining company Rio Tinto, and the oil companies BP and Shell. Banks, among them Lloyds and Barclays, are also major donors to nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations. Worldwide, AstraZeneca was the top UK corporate donor for “community investment” for 2008–9, although it is important to note that nearly 90 percent of this “giving” came in the form of “product donations.”14
Some corporations are going beyond just funding and advising of NGOs to initiating and guiding nongovernmental initiatives. One example is Nike’s “the Girl Effect” to support adolescent girls living in poverty (see chapter 2 for details). Emily Brew is the brand creative director at the Nike Foundation. “Much of what we have done with the Girl Effect,” she explains, “stems from Nike and our corporate culture. We feel like we are in the business of building a movement.”15
Corporate funding for advocacy organizations is climbing steadily. Yet, as NGO numbers swell and organizations continue to grow, competition among NGOs for this money is intensifying. Brand positioning is now as fierce among NGOs as among corporations. “Amateurish, wishful-thinking campaigns are relics of the past,” explain the authors of a multiyear analysis of NGO branding. “Today international nonprofits operate in a highly competitive environment, facing the same communication challenges, media clutter, and overexposed, skeptical target audiences as commercial enterprises.”16
NGOs are working hard to differentiate and guard their brands. The value of a brand is partly a product of what an organization accomplishes. Trust in Amnesty’s brand, for example, no doubt reflects its successes in exposing and preventing human rights abuses. Incoherent messaging, however, can cause brand value to trickle away even when an organization’s record is stellar. Even worse, a public gaffe or scandal can cause brand trust (and thus value) to go into free fall.
Institutionalizing activism into a top-down bureaucracy with corporate-style management allows for more consistent messaging and strategic branding – impossible (and a highly unlikely goal) for leaderless movements or spontaneous protests. Money and access to corridors of power help with messaging and branding too, as does working within the established order to find political allies and corporate partners.
Some activists are pushing back. For them, embedding activism into such a politics of money is a calamity, creating a “nonprofit industrial complex” of brand NGOs and career activists.
The nonprofit industrial complex comprises corporations, state agencies, lobby associations, charitable foundations, and nongovernmental organizations. As with the idea of a “militaryindustrial complex,” critics of the nonprofit industrial complex emphasize “symbiotic relationships” across elites that privilege the ideologies, security, and interests of those with money and power.17 One effect, as Robert Silverman and Kelly Patterson argue, is to turn NGOs into “service providers, while discouraging advocacy and political activism.” Those NGOs inside this complex “quit dissent and institutionalize corporatist values,” at the end of the day upholding rather than challenging the values and practices of the current world order.18
The conclusion of writer and community activist Andrea del Moral is damning: “organizations that began as radical grassroots associations of individuals become corporations that largely copy the mainstream economy. They are professional, though not educated on the ground about the actual issues; organized, but not effective; compliant with tax laws, but not responsive or accountable to community needs.”19
Many other grassroots activists agree. Twenty-one of them came together in the book The Revolution Will Not Be Funded to call for an overthrow of the nonprofit industrial complex. For them, professionalizing activism eviscerates its capacity to confront the injustice and inequality of the status quo. Madonna Thunder Hawk of South Dakota’s Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation writes: “when you start paying people to do activism, you can start to attract people to the work who are not primarily motivated by or dedicated to the struggle.” She worries just as much about what this change has done to the thinking of those who never imagined making money for campaigning. “Before we know it,” she continues, “we start to expect to be paid and do less unpaid work than we would have before.”
Accountability to those on the periphery of power, these critics add, is lost as NGO activists internalize values and goals of their funding sources. Adjoa Florência Jones de Almeida of New York’s Sista II Sista Collective writes: “We as activists are no longer accountable to our constituents or members because we don’t depend on them for our existence. Instead, we’ve become primarily accountable to public and private foundations as we try to prove to them that we are still relevant and efficient and thus worthy of continued funding.”
Amara Pérez of Oregon’s Sisters in Action for Power goes even further and sees the nonprofit industrial complex as constructing a “business model” where NGOs “sell their political work for a grant” – and are then held answerable to a foundation. “The products sold,” she writes, “include the organizing accomplishments, models, and successes that one can put on display to prove competency and legitimacy.” Over the years this business of activism causes the values and objectives of dissenters to moderate “from strategies for radical change to charts and tables that demonstrate how successfully the work has satisfied foundation-determined benchmarks.”20
More corporate funding of (and partnerships with) NGOs is one of the most prominent characteristics of the nonprofit industrial complex. Three other trends stand out as well, with, of course, many differences in degree across movements and particular NGOs: a striking increase in the number of activists working in top-down bureaucracies; a gradual strengthening of a culture of managerialism; and a deepening belief in the value of restraint and moderation.
Greenpeace incorporated in British Columbia in 1972. Five years later its structure was still loose. At that time, cofounder Robert Hunter reflects in his book Warriors of the Rainbow, “virtually anybody could set themselves up as a Greenpeace office, taking more or less full credit for all the achievements to date, and appoint himself or herself to a position, using no formulas more elaborate than the one we had used ourselves in Vancouver: simply, you get a bunch of your friends in a room and proclaim yourselves.” Today, as chapter 1 details, Greenpeace International coordinates the branding and campaign strategies of more than two dozen national and regional offices, with an elected international board appointing an international executive director who, in turn, supervises what Greenpeace calls its “senior managers.”21
The Greenpeace bureaucracy is definitely not the most centralized or hierarchical among international NGOs. A few NGOs, as we know from disgruntled defectors, border on dictatorships. Nor is Greenpeace the most complex of the international NGOs. Others, sometimes through mergers or sometimes by incorporating smaller NGOs, are much larger, with activists inside a maze of seemingly infinite committees, from policy to accounting to hiring. Yet the evolution of Greenpeace – from a movement of free spirits and hippies to a multinational organization “managed” by an international board of directors and trustees – is an instructive example of the institutionalization of even the most radical ideas and groups.22
Today, international NGOs employ thousands of office workers, researchers, and program organizers. And salaries and benefits comprise a sizeable portion of their budgets. Care International employs over 11,000 staff, and the International Committee of the Red Cross employs over 12,000 staff. WWF has about 2,500 full-time employees. In comparison, the World Food Programme employs around 12,000 people.
Reimbursing expenses and giving honorariums to campaign organizers have long been common among activists. Now, however, NGO boards of directors also hire executives to build institutions. Performance bonuses and oversight committees are put in place to encourage greater efficiencies and demand concrete outcomes. Incentives and advisory boards encourage NGO executives to raise more funds, hire more staff, and acquire more branches worldwide.23
Senior management and consultants for NGOs tend to receive salaries along the lines of government and small-business pay scales. The CEOs of both the US World Wildlife Fund and the US Fund for UNICEF received more than US$450,000 in compensation in 2011; that year the executive director of Human Rights Watch received more than US$400,000 and the president of the Canada’s World Vision more than US$375,000. These salaries are magnitudes higher than those for on-the-ground program workers or “grassroots” organizers. To save on total salary costs (yet still retain leaders), many NGOs rely on low-paid or unpaid interns, requiring a history of volunteering for any chance of a permanent job.24
Salaries, performance pay, and bonuses for senior NGO executives are nowhere near those of a president or vice-president of a Fortune 500 company. Like corporate executives, however, NGO leaders routinely jet around the world to network with business and political elites (as well as with one another). Often, the goal of a conference or workshop is lofty: to end poverty, disease, or environmental degradation. Yet critics see great hypocrisy in the contrast between the lifestyle of NGO elites and their claims of doing good. “The NGO leaders,” activist and sociologist James Petras derides, “are a new class not based on property ownership or government resources but derived from imperial funding and their capacity to control significant popular groups.” For him, these leaders are little more than a “neo-compradore group that doesn’t produce any useful commodity but does function to produce services for the donor countries – mainly trading in domestic poverty for individual perks.”25
NGO management subordinates the role of street-level activists and community volunteers in important ways. Less emphasis is put on engaging them in the hard and time-consuming work of transforming communities (including personal actions). Volunteers on the ground are no doubt still essential for running campaigns and programs. But most of the focus is on getting them to donate money or buy sponsored products, or perhaps sign online petitions or recruit new members through social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.26
Such efforts treat grassroots activists as consumers rather than as collaborators in social or political change. The grass-roots has little hand in determining NGO priorities or strategies or projects. Such matters are left to boards of directors, CEOs and presidents, and senior management teams. Elite stakeholder consultations – with a dash of the grassroots – help to legitimize the decisions of NGO central.
Centralizing and professionalizing activist campaigns into branded organizations has been a boon for fundraising. In the US, nonprofit revenues grew by more than 40 percent between 2000 and 2010.27 Greater revenue, however, has generally not meant more money for grassroots campaigning. More often, the opposite is the case, as active management boards restructure and as assertive middle managers trim inefficiencies and “waste” from local branches and community activities.28
Corporate members of nonprofit boards tend further to encourage nonprofits to centralize control, as in the experience of many executives this is a main ingredient of business “success.” The appointment of more corporate members to NGO boards is steadily increasing this pressure to centralize management. Board members and foundations are also pressing NGOs to do this as a way of enhancing transparency and accountability – arguing it is necessary to ensure that funders, as well as business and government stakeholders, consider the organization up to standard.29
Of course, increasing the transparency and accountability of NGOs can bring many benefits as well as help to avoid many abuses. Still, at best, centralized management boards and executive teams consult members superficially, increasing rather than decreasing the autocratic and undemocratic tendencies of any institution without elections. These NGOs, moreover, tend to sell members a brand and a product rather than bringing them into the decision-making in any real way. “Transparency” and “accountability” end up taking on a corporate-accounting meaning rather than a citizen-participatory meaning.
Conforming to corporate standards is no doubt a far cry from the democratic ideals of most social movements. For the grass-roots, corporate-style reporting from the headquarters provides a mere glimpse into the internal workings of NGOs, which, as human rights scholar Julie Mertus says, can be “decidedly opaque.” And such reporting does even less to address the worry, as Mertus adds, that “NGOs, acting individually and in networks, often wield influence on decision-making ‘behind closed doors’ and without pluralistic participation.”30
Dylan Rodriguez, a professor at the University of California Riverside, sees “a tangle of incentives” from gaining “nonprofit status” as partly explaining the institutionalization of activism into corporate-style bureaucracies. Once up and running as a nonprofit, the organization comes to rely on its tax-exempt status and flow of funds from foundations and donors. Losing this status is the equivalent of bankruptcy for a company. And responding to the demands of states and business is the equivalent of responding to the demands of clients and customers for a company.31
Activist Andrea del Moral sees an even more direct link between an activist campaign gaining nonprofit status and the trend to concentrate decision-making in top-down institutions: “To gain tax-exempt status – often seen as an economic necessity – an organization has to model its leadership on corporate hierarchy. Instead of encouraging people involved in the organization to lead it, governance often comes from outside.”32
The gaining of nonprofit status, moreover, limits activist strategies and tactics. In the United States, for instance, it disallows some political acts, such as endorsing an electoral candidate, as well as some kinds of lobbying.33 Rodriguez does not hold back in what he thinks are the consequences of nonprofit status for more radical causes and possibilities for more far-reaching reforms. “Increasingly,” he writes “avowedly progressive, radical, leftist, and even some self-declared ‘revolutionary’ groups have found assimilation into this state-sanctioned organizational paradigm a practical route to institutionalization.”34
As mentioned, public trust in nonprofit institutions is generally higher than trust in business or governments. Polls further suggest that business–NGO partnerships tend to increase trust in corporations.35 Yet many analysts question the overall transparency, accountability, and representative capacity of NGOs, especially those crisscrossing jurisdictions. Some critics see international NGO leaders as little more than “self-appointed altruists” with influence that “far exceeds both the merits of arguments and their right to represent, for example, the wishes and interests of the poor communities.”36
Many trade unions, too, question the legitimacy of NGO executives who “are neither elected by, nor representative of, the workers they wish to defend.”37 Back in 2000 The Economist magazine captured this sentiment well: “The increasing clout of NGOs, respectable and not so respectable, raises an important question: who elected Oxfam, or, for that matter, the League for a Revolutionary Communist International? … In the West, governments and their agencies are, in the end, accountable to voters. Who holds the activists accountable?”38
The Occupy movement is an intriguing example of a “leaderless” movement struggling to retain a structure that remains accountable to those protesting in the streets. To allow tax-exempt donations, for instance, Occupy Wall Street allied with the Alliance for Global Justice in Tucson, Arizona; at the same time, however, it has resisted imposing a corporate-style chain of command to govern finances. Its bank account is managed by an “accounting working group,” which, like all working groups, is answerable to the “General Assembly.” This General Assembly, comprising an ever evolving group of street-level activists, is supposed to meet regularly in public areas to debate and review any financial or in-kind donation.39
Occupy members take pride in their leaderless and decentralized structure. Since 2012, however, at least some activists have come to see this structure as the decisive reason for drifting priorities and declining turnout. For them, the movement would need to centralize control and professionalize management into a permanent organization to have any chance of lasting influence.
Managerialism itself, as Michael Meyer, Renate Buber, and Anahid Aghamanoukjan argue, is “one of the most powerful institutional practices of our time.” Especially since the early 1990s, funders and community stakeholders have increasingly come to expect NGOs “to act according to managerialist norms” – to be, in other words, more “business-like” and maximize efficiencies, investment returns, and brand value.40
Management principles of efficiency and effectiveness run deep among today’s NGOs.41 Mission statements reflect them; boards and executive teams insist on them; managers and staff must measure and evaluate them. Institutionalizing a pecking order of bosses, staff, and clients and working within markets are commonly seen as ways of enhancing efficiency and effectiveness. And practices such as “benchmarking” are seen as a way of tracking and evaluating progress as well as improving “performance.”42
Prioritizing the principles of efficiency and effectiveness tends to increase the value organizations place on achieving small successes: of meeting timelines, of accomplishing goals, of staying within budgets. Managers understandably emphasize the need to complete tasks over the (at times, anyway) seemingly impossible work of mobilizing a movement to transform politics.
At the same time, the leaders of multinational NGOs are emphasizing the need to harmonize standards and goals across organizational branches. Across large and complex organizations this allows for greater consistency in outcomes. It also reduces the risk of bad publicity and reputational damage. World Vision International, Caritas International, and Oxfam International have all set “quality standards” for their national and regional organizations.43 Standardization is seen as necessary both to protect brand value and to improve the financial efficiency of an organization as a whole.
To trim inefficiencies, NGO managers look to get rid of redundancies, cut costs, and reduce waste. Increasingly, many managers are also taking an entrepreneurial approach and charging fees, licensing logos, selling products and services, and partnering with firms in exchange for a portion of profits. “[P]rofit motivation,” as Katherine Marshall says, “is rarely an explicit NGO purpose.” Yet often NGO leaders and managers “see business principles and private sector disciplines as drivers of both creativity and efficiency.”44 Teaching efficiency skills and training NGO managers has become an industry in itself, with self-help books, websites, and “numerous consultants, think-tanks, private organizations, and universities offering specialized training programs in NGO management.”45
Managerialism of this kind is not exclusive to NGOs headquartered in the global North. Increasingly, NGO funding worldwide depends on being able to adhere to the managerial principles of funders, including state agencies, multilateral institutions (e.g., World Bank), and corporate partners. Small NGOs in the global South are under extreme pressure from private funders, aid agencies, and partner NGOs to develop administrative systems to boost efficiency of operations, accountability to funders, and transparency to stakeholders. Among these are following corporate bookkeeping practices, conducting impact assessments, and auditing projects to monitor “returns” on donations.46
Measurable results for more and more donors are proof of efficiency and effectiveness. A results-oriented funding climate, management consultant Adrian Bordone argues, has pushed NGOs that “have in the past depended on anecdote and compassion to propel their fund-raising success to more aggressively pursue a data-based value proposition.”47 Venture philanthropists and social entrepreneurs are explicit about the need to track and quantify progress. But more governments and foundations are also requiring NGOs to go beyond “process” and deliver results confirmed by statistical analysis.
The risk of focusing on quantifiable projects, cautions Harvard business professor Alnoor Ebrahim, “is that funding might flow to things that are easily measurable, rather than important to measure.” Along similar lines, James Petras warns of what can happen when activists give in to such demands: “NGOs emphasize projects, not movements; they ‘mobilize’ people to produce at the margins not to struggle to control the basic means of production and wealth; they focus on technical financial assistance aspects of projects not on structural conditions that shape the everyday lives of people.”48
Managing brand value and brand image are now top priorities of every multinational NGO. Ones such as CARE and UNICEF have undergone “rebranding.” Others, including the Red Cross, WWF, and Habitat for Humanity, have hired world-leading brand marketers, such as Interbrand, McCann-Erickson Worldwide, and Young & Rubicam.49
Not long ago the very idea of managing an “advocacy brand” would cause consternation among activists. When Amnesty International embarked in 2006 on a “global identity project,” those in charge were wary of using the term “brand,” not wanting an association with branding to tarnish the feel-good image of the organization. Asked about using the word in the early years, Amnesty’s Sara Wilbourne chuckled, “No, we didn’t use the B-word back then. It was totally anathema.”50
No one would say this now. “Nowadays we use the word,” reflects Amnesty’s Markus Beeko; “it’s quite widespread.”51 Amnesty hired the marketing firm GlobeScan – whose other clients include Unilever, Pepsi, and Rio Tinto – to launch “a new brand identity for the next 50 years.” Amnesty “needed to build a revitalized brand identity,” explains GlobeScan, “to encourage unity internally and to make them stronger externally.”52
Why has Amnesty, along with so many other NGOs, rushed to brand over the last decade? Until around 2005, as Harvard business professor John Quelch says, inside most NGOs “the word ‘marketing’ would not be mentioned in conversation around the water cooler.” Yet today, as Quelch adds, because NGOs are competing for funds and audiences and media spots in a surging throng of charities and causes, branding has become necessary to survive as an organization – a trend that is strengthening as more NGOs establish brand partnerships with multinational corporations and as corporate donations to NGOs continue to climb.53
High brand value and trust in turn can attract even more corporate partnerships and funding. Take Habitat for Humanity International: in 2002, senior executives doubled the price of a corporate partnership after a 2001 market analysis put its brand value at $US1.8 billion, about the same as Starbucks. The following year Habitat for Humanity negotiated new sponsorship deals with Whirlpool and Lowe’s and was able to pull in nearly 50 percent more from the corporate sector (US$39 million).54
Some social activists deride the NGO turn toward branding and the corresponding embrace of market values. Everyone can see this is helping NGOs to raise money and gain access to corporate boardrooms. But critics worry that branding is yet another symptom of the “corporate mimicry” of NGOs, corroding their capacity to act “as agents of systemic social and political change” and leaving them as little more than apologists for compromise with big business and market capitalism.55
Institutionalization creates incentives for an advocacy group to adopt a strategy of conciliation toward prevailing structures and ideologies rather than struggling against systemic exploitation and injustices. NGO leaders face constant pressures to pay salaries and campaign bills. Bold demands and risky tactics tend to fall to the wayside in favor of cooperation with “stakeholders,” as well as demonstrating results to supporters and funders.
The post-9/11 security architecture fortifies this philosophy of compromise.56 Confrontational groups, as chapter 3 explores, run the real danger of being labeled as “radical” by a state security apparatus, with grave and immediate consequences for organizational financing, brand value, and personal safety. Losing nonprofit or UN observer status would ruin many organizations. Worse still would be a charge by the state that an organization was a front for terrorists. Who, among “successful” NGO executives, wants to gamble with their budgets and staffing and programming? Quite understandably, NGO leaders work to control any possible direct-action tactics of members, such as campaigns to damage property or economic activity, and instead focus organizational efforts on “awareness raising” and “service provisioning” to raise funds, as well as to enhance the legitimacy of the organization with member donors, state financiers, and business backers.
Fundraising fuels institutionalization. At the same time, institutions enable more funding from foundations, governments, and business. Such funding in turn adds to the pressures from within nonprofit organizations to curb grassroots independence and lobbying, as well as more nebulous efforts, such as empowering disadvantaged communities.57 Pressures from donors and states are further deradicalizing and depoliticizing NGOs. Many “development” funders, for example, are now requiring recipients to “reduce” poverty in ways that are quantifiable. For many NGOs, this need to reduce poverty has become part of both getting and renewing funding – a focus that is encouraging those working in developing countries to shift away from supporting social movements and social change and toward advancing particular economic indicators.58
Pursuing economic benefits in turn tends to bring pragmatic tactics, emphasizing small change within prevailing social and market structures. Even among NGOs wary of working with firms, the vast majority now accept the institutions of private property, markets, and multinational corporations. Does this mean that more critical activists are giving up? Absolutely not. Even here, though, tactics do tend to be more mild-mannered and lighthearted than in the past.
One example from 2012 was the staging by Greenpeace and the “Yes Men” of an oil industry banquet to “celebrate” oil drilling in the Arctic. During the banquet, held in the Seattle Space Needle, a model oilrig to dispense drinks, nestled beside a mock-iceberg with the Shell logo, malfunctions and spurts forth dark-brown Coca-Cola. Organizers then rush hither and thither to try to plug the gushing stream, a few even grabbing stuffed polar bears to try to stem the flow. Overnight, this lampooning of Arctic drilling went viral on YouTube. James Turner of Greenpeace USA explains the goal of this lavish prank: “Social media offers us the opportunity to use humor and inventiveness to reach people in a way that hopefully entertains and engages them, while making a serious point at the same time.”59
Cause marketing has become a valuable source of funding for many NGOs, with more and more allocating sizable budgets and staff to manage their marketing partnerships with companies. Having first appeared in the early 1980s, NGO–corporate partnerships to “allow” a consumer to “donate” a few cents by purchasing a product or using a credit card are now commonplace. So are licensing agreements to permit companies to use an NGO brand to sell products.
WWF is a leader in cause marketing. But, as chapter 2 documents, other NGOs are queuing to negotiate deals with big-brand corporations. Cause marketing is now ubiquitous in Europe and North America and is spreading in developing countries such as Bangladesh and emerging economies such as China. The Bangladeshi NGO BRAC, the world’s biggest NGO by staff numbers, even runs profitable side businesses selling handicrafts, food, and salt to “fund” its anti-poverty advocacy.60
Cause marketing is set to keep flourishing, not only as a source of NGO funds but also as a part of corporate brand value and image. Surveys in the United States, for example, show that consumers appreciate and value cause products – and, most importantly, are in fact buying such products to “support” a cause. At least some of these consumers see such purchases as their primary, and in some cases only, way of “donating” to social causes. Consumers also appear to want even more cause products – with one survey finding more than 80 percent of Americans “wishing” for more. Future growth of cause marketing, however, will not serve all causes equally; more personal and emotional causes, such as curing cancer or funding disaster relief or saving polar bears, have been marketing bonanzas, but more contentious or political causes, such as helping refugees or ex-convicts, have garnered relatively little interest from firms and consumers.61
Geographer Ruth Gilmore is blunt in her critique of contemporary activism: “a lot of nonprofits have a bigger stake in staying alive than in accomplishing their mission.”62 For them to survive as organizations, oversight boards demand “sustainable budgets.” NGO bookkeepers comb the accounts for errors and NGO lawyers sue for defamation and copyright infringements. Junior managers set timelines to promote organizational vigor. Senior executives work long days to maintain staffing and programming. And NGO presidents hire and fire to keep the organization “healthy.”
The institutionalization of activism, however, is more than just an ever expanding bureaucracy of top-down decision-making and bottom-up reporting. Institutions absorb the energy of activism that was once campaigning for a different world order, turning it into a reinforcing mechanism rather than a challenging force. Institutional strategies temper and constrain what rank-and-file activists are able to say and do. Employees end up speaking of “budgets” and “deliverables” and “measurable successes.” Caution and pragmatism reign.
Increasingly, NGO structures emulate business ones. NGOs are marketing and branding to increase fundraising capacity – and grow programs and expand into new “markets.” In this context, NGO partnerships with big business are flourishing as brand forces join to sell more products (for profit and causes). Some of the world’s NGOs are only just beginning to head down this path. And the structures of many of the hundreds of thousands of tiny NGOs in the developing world look quite different from WWF or Save the Children or Amnesty International. Yet, at least to some extent, even small NGOs far from the centers of power are getting caught in the institutional netting of the nonprofit world, as donors, for example, increasingly make “partnerships” with business and multinational NGOs a mandatory condition of funding.
Ever more, this unremitting process of institutionalization is shifting the strategies of activists toward promoting continuity and stability. Activists working inside institutions come to see moderation and pragmatism as the most sensible strategy for achieving change. The change sought is moving away from systemic sources and toward micro-solutions. And the mechanisms for achieving change are shifting to markets and trade and corporations, as the values of market capitalism increasingly permeate NGOs, and as NGOs increasingly enjoy the pecuniary and power privileges of the nonprofit industrial complex.
The securitization of activism and privatization of social life go hand in hand with this process of institutionalization to deepen further the corporatization of activism. NGOs are doing substantial good inside this corporate frame: providing social services, raising research funds, spotlighting exploitative practices, preventing human rights abuses, and preserving biodiversity. Arguably, the capacity of NGOs to deliver small-scale change is even increasing. Yet, as we explore in our next and last chapter, this does not change what we see as an inescapable conclusion: the corporatization of activism is empowering firms and their state allies, as well as legitimizing the disparities and injustices of today. This does not mean the activist world is becoming a tranquil place. Many in the grassroots are irate with NGOs for caving in to the establishment.