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BREAKING (11:15 AM ET): Komen backed down in a statement first published in the Dallas Morning News. The devil, as always, is in the details as this story shows, and as we speak, evidence of loopholes is already pouring out over social networks after the announcement. Komen is still behind the PR frame. Parse the statement below the fold.
Watching Susan G. Komen for the Cure in its epic PR death spiral over the last few days has been breathtaking. For an charity that built a national brand based on a mission to cure breast cancer, and caring about the health of women, it sure went into panic mode and threw poor women under the bus to defend itself about its decision financially punish Planned Parenthood for myriad reasons, depending on what time of the day you’re asking Komen’s Nancy Brinker, whose anti-choice, anti-gay fingerprints are all over this.
I haven’t blogged about this hot mess to date (but I’ve been all over social media), because there’s a lot of great blogging and mainstream reporting that you’ve probably already tapped into. I finally boiled down my observations into one Facebook post:
This Komen meltdown is fascinating (though the overall dropkick to Planned Parenthood is horrid) because 1) the org was completely hijacked by the right-wing, and 2) I’ve never seen such a poor communications/spin in an org of that size and 3) any org this inept at seeing the PR train barreling down on it and stays on the tracks deserves to go down hard, and 4) it shows how desperate the anti-choice, womb control, anti-women’s right to reproductive control crowd is trying to find every angle to put women back in the dark ages.
One of the womb-controllers with agita over the response — Planned Parenthood’s donations are way up — including one for $250K from N.Y. Mayor Mike Bloomberg — is Matt “Bam Bam” Barber of Liberty Counsel:
@jmattbarber: Left goes berserk over Komen’s Planned Parenthood smackdown. Nothing angers liberals more than making it harder to dismember babies #Life
Really? Is this best the pious fertilized egg worshippers can do? All of the other services that Planned Parenthood provides to women in need are meaningless. It’s all about the fetus, which is precious until a woman gives birth and the Right runs for cover, clinging to its wallet to protect it from funding any social safety net.
Hey, if Komen’s against access to abortion services, it can’t complain when donors who support access to those services flee (taking along with it their hard-earned money)? Anyway, what do you think some of the Komen board members are thinking right about now (as the house burns and no fire trucks are on the way)? I’d be thinking about how to make a quick exit after the performance of Nancy Brinker in damage control mode.
This is the Komen YouTube description for its YouTube upload “Amb. Nancy G. Brinker appears on MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Reports: February 2, 2012″ – no lie. And feel the flopsweat: “In one of her first live comments since the Tuesday announcement, Ambassador Nancy G. Brinker told NBC’s Andrea Mitchell that the decision was made to revamp and strengthen the way the organization makes grants.”
The video currently has a 82% Thumbs Down rating. #FAIL.
I tell you one thing – any org that thinks it cannot be destroyed by a social media onslaught better think again. The power it has is the potential to stop an org with an incompetent PR/Comm dept from ever getting the framing back once the mainstream media picks it up and runs with it. This burned too hot, too fast in too many social digital circles, and Komen’s response is feeble, flailing and completely, transparently seen as politically f’d up damage control.
No wonder, as Bernard Tarver noted in the earlier Facebook thread,, that this is why the government wants to put social media in check.
Statement from Nancy Brinker and the Susan G. Komen Board of Directors:
We want to apologize to the American public for recent decisions that cast doubt upon our commitment to our mission of saving women’s lives.
The events of this week have been deeply unsettling for our supporters, partners and friends and all of us at Susan G. Komen. We have been distressed at the presumption that the changes made to our funding criteria were done for political reasons or to specifically penalize Planned Parenthood. They were not.
Our original desire was to fulfill our fiduciary duty to our donors by not funding grant applications made by organizations under investigation. We will amend the criteria to make clear that disqualifying investigations must be criminal and conclusive in nature and not political. That is what is right and fair.
Our only goal for our granting process is to support women and families in the fight against breast cancer. Amending our criteria will ensure that politics has no place in our grant process. We will continue to fund existing grants, including those of Planned Parenthood, and preserve their eligibility to apply for future grants, while maintaining the ability of our affiliates to make funding decisions that meet the needs of their communities.
It is our hope and we believe it is time for everyone involved to pause, slow down and reflect on how grants can most effectively and directly be administered without controversies that hurt the cause of women. We urge everyone who has participated in this conversation across the country over the last few days to help us move past this issue. We do not want our mission marred or affected by politics – anyone’s politics.
Starting this afternoon, we will have calls with our network and key supporters to refocus our attention on our mission and get back to doing our work. We ask for the public’s understanding and patience as we gather our Komen affiliates from around the country to determine how to move forward in the best interests of the women and people we serve.
We extend our deepest thanks for the outpouring of support we have received from so many in the past few days and we sincerely hope that these changes will be welcomed by those who have expressed their concern.
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I’ve mentioned this on Pam’s Facebook posts, but I’ll do it here.
The religious reicht have revered and worshiped the fetus to the point of turning it into a fetish. Like some fetishists, they focus on it to the point where it becomes their whole life.
The more fanatical of these fetishists want every woman to join their club to the point where they want to force *every* pregnant woman to bear their fetus. I call them the “Mandatory Motherhood Mob”.
I remember a four-panel political cartoon from many years ago where in the first panel, a woman is standing there, somewhat showing her pregnancy and some guy sees her. The next two panels shows her being surrounded by more and more members of the MMM as her pregnancy advances. The final panel shows her holding her crying baby, now alone with one last person exiting the scene.
THAT describes the MMM to a tee!
I have always wondered about SGK anyway. It seems to me the thing they are best at is branding and organizing walks. I’ve been curious as to how much of that money actually flows to breast cancer research. But even in making this comment, I admit I really don’t know. This fracas certainly doesn’t make me supportive of them, even with several breast cancer survivors in my family.
According to http://ww5.komen.org/uploadedFiles/SGKFTC_FY10AnnualReport.pdf
In 2010 (excluding in-kind, which appears to be about 5% of their revenue):
12% administration
8% fundraising
7% treatment
15% screening
24% research (75,407,000$)
34% education
Their gross income was a bit over 420,000,000$ that year, about 40% of which came from their Race for the Cure.
Administration is higher than I would have expected. That may have to do with the workload of properly administering research grants. What really surprises me is education – 140,773,000$ to educate 2.2 million people is over 60$/person. I’m curious why those costs are so high; perhaps they train a lot of doctors at well over 60$/person, and train the general population (which makes up most of their numbers) at far less?
I knew they were done for when they brought in Karen Handel as VP…she’s the Ms. ‘Gays are not legitimate parents’ bigot from my homestate. Sorry I have no control over that export.
But it is done and a once great organization is now and forever will be soiled.
Looking at http://ww5.komen.org/uploadedFiles/Content/AboutUs/Financial/AUDIT_FINAL_FY2010.pdf (same year, but the audit instead of the report) I note a couple things:
The education is all labelled “Public Health eduction” It includes over 19,000,000$ in Salaries, over 19,000,000$ in Professional Fees, over 2,000,000$ in “Miscellaneous”, over 29,000,000$ in “Awards and Grants”, over 42,000,000$ in “Marketing and Communication” and over 6,000,000$ in “Race series production”. No, that doesn’t clarify much for me.
They started up their own health screening services in 2010; in 2009, all over 39,000,000$ was to “Awards and Grants”. In 2010 a bit over 2,000,000$ was spent by them on health screening. I wonder if part of this is Komen’s taking over their screening services directly?
And the answer appears to be “no”. In the fiscal year ending in 2011, their grants for health screening services is up (over 51,000,000$), not down, even if their own screening is also up (over 3,000,000).
Oh… and about 17% (75,301,537$) of their overall income (439,451,449$) went into research during the fiscal year ending in March 2011. Note that unlike the 2010 number, this isn’t excluding in-kind. Source: http://ww5.komen.org/uploadedFiles/Content/AboutUs/Financial/2011%20Komen%20Financial%20Statements%20FINAL%283%29.pdf
Update:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/03/susan-g-komen-planned-parenthood_n_1252651.html
Allegedly from Brinker:
We want to apologize to the American public for recent decisions that cast doubt upon our commitment to our mission of saving women’s lives… We will amend the criteria to make clear that disqualifying investigations must be criminal and conclusive in nature and not political. That is what is right and fair…
How low can the Komen Foundation sink before it dies off?
http://www.discountgunsales.com/walther-p-22-hope-edition-34-pr-4228.html
To be fair I have not seen any confirmation/denial from either the website or the Seattle branch of the Komen Foundation that has been published so I cannot say that it is official endorsement or not.
But really … WTF?!???! I thought the KFC endorsement was a little dubious but this, if an officially endorsed product, just takes the cake.
I have posted this before, but I think that you get it. Brinker was trained in classic PR. Ten-twelve years ago, a release would have gone out to the news media which she has schmoozed for thirty years. They would have reported, or not, the story from the release in a positive light. It would have all been over by the six o’clock news. SGK would have lost some support, but not much. Citizen outrage would have been ignored, or cast as the fringe ravings of a small group.
Social networking and citizen journalists on the series of tubes have forever change the way public relations work. I have been watching the backlash to the point of having whiplash. The message cannot be controlled. The message cannot be stifled. The message cannot be diverted.
After the dust has settled, this episode will be dissected and end up in every PR college text. It will serve as a cautionary tale of what not to do in the digital age.
Classic Public Relations is dead.
Nail on head.
It goes to illustrate the arrogance of power and the snafu principle. When you get so high and mighty, you’re at greater risk of making bad decisions because the only people you allow close to you are those who tell you what you want to hear.
As the Boston Globe noted in an op-ed, this P.R. disaster for Komen was–conversely–a giant opportunity for Planned Parenthood. Which the latter used skillfully, to publicize its wide range of services: and the fact that most of those services are not abortions.
Which of course the far Right won’t acknowledge. But the facts will certainly be noticed by past (and former) Komen supporters.
Here’s an interesting article that may tell us where some of the money went:
http://herewomentalk.com/the-opinionated-bitch-%E2%80%93-on-the-susan-g-komen-foundation
Actually, many non-profits report their fundraising efforts as “educational,” allowing them to fudge their numbers.
I found out about this kind of number shuffling when I worked at a phone bank for a big PIRG; we were told that simply identifying the call as being from the PIRG was educating the person at the other end of the call; hence this made our boiler-room phone harassment an education expense.
I quit the next day.
I think that most people have now learned that SGK has NOT actually backed down, but simply once again put lipstick on its pig.
It has NOT said that it will continue to fund Planned Parenthood going forward; it has said simply that Planned Parenthood will retain its eligibility for funding.
People should also note that last November SGK announced that it would no longer fund research using embryonic stem cells.
http://www.lifenews.com/2012/02/01/komen-also-stops-funding-embryonic-stem-cell-research-centers/
I suspect the “education” also covers advertising and propaganda, rather than actual education about breast cancer and it’s causes and cures…does this make any sense?
I’ve heard it isn’t the first time that the people of SGK behave like Republican ideologues. They have lobbied against healthcare reform, funding for research on environmental causes for cancer and for universal screening even when it’s net negative.