Using Humor to Raise Awareness — and Dollars
The Radi-Aid Awards help celebrate the best — and worst — in charity fundraising
by Jennifer Golden
We’ve all seen them… those heartrending commercials featuring hungry children in desperate squalor, asking us, the viewers, to help. Do you reach for your wallet, or do you, like many of us, quickly change the channel?
“These repeated images of poverty, violence, and war…It comes to a point when we as human beings are unable to take it all in,” said Anja Bakken Riise, past president of the Norwegian Students’ and Academics’ International Assistance Fund (SAIH) in a 2013 TEDx Talk. “These campaigns, these stereotypes — they create apathy, not action.”
In 2012, SAIH made headlines with a satirical video that highlighted what they saw as a tendency in predominantly Western aid agencies’ fundraising campaigns to portray the poor “as passive recipients of help, without the ability or desire to make their country a better place to live.” The video, “Radi-Aid: Africa for Norway” featured African rapper Breezy V calling for Africans to donate their radiators to the freezing peoples of Norway:
“People don’t ignore starving people, so why should we ignore cold people. Frostbite kills, too,” the rapper says with great sincerity. “Africa, we need to make a difference in Norway. We need to collect our radiators, ship them over there, and spread some warmth, spread some light, and spread some smiles. Say ‘yes’ to Radi-Aid!”
With more than three million views and counting, the video touched a nerve, highlighting a need for a debate about Western representations of developing countries. Beathe Øgård, current SAIH president said the group was shocked by how much attention the video received.
“I think in the beginning, attention was coming from everywhere and I think it was because we had this alternative way of portraying it and using humor, which made the message more accessible, not only to those engaged in the aid communication field,” she said. “We also found out that we had to do something with the crowd of people who suddenly showed a lot of commitment to start working on these issues.”
Thus, the Radi-Aid campaign was born.
And the Radiator Goes To…
Each year, in an effort to promote “more nuanced information about development and poverty,” SAIH, through its Radi-Aid initiative, sponsors a contest that highlights and analyzes the best and worst of charity fundraising videos. In recent years, the group says, fundraising campaigns “have shown increasing examples of creative and engaging portrayals in charity ads, demonstrating the many various ways a charity campaign can succeed without traditional and stereotypical representations.”
The 2017 winner of the Golden Radiator award — given to the video campaign that “moves beyond stereotypes, describes tangible and achievable solutions to issues, and inspires rather than provokes guilt” — was a campaign from the nonprofit group War Child Holland. In the video, a Syrian child is shown playing around a refugee camp with Batman. Amid the dusty tents, the duo play hide-and-seek, arm wrestle, and generally pal around to the happy tune of “You’re My Best Friend” by Queen. At the end of the video, the Caped Crusader turns into the boy’s father, and the video reminds us “Fantasy is often the only way for children in war to escape their reality.” The Radi-Aid jury, comprised of humanitarian activists from around the world, applauded the video for its use of “effective humanitarian crisis imagery” while still “showing the kid as a kid.”
By contrast, the jury labeled a video featuring Ed Sheeran visiting homeless children in West Africa “poverty tourism” and awarded it the Rusty Radiator — the distinction for the video with the worst use of stereotypes. (Ironically, the video was produced by Comic Relief, an organization historically committed to using comedy as a philanthropic tool.) This video, as well as the two other 2017 Rusty Radiator nominees, are outdated and overly simplistic, according to SAIH’s Øgård.
“We have been presented with these kinds of images since the 1980s,” she said. “People are so used to them that for many they reinforce that feeling of hopelessness and apathy — and even a negative view of development in that nothing is going in the right direction.”
The Power of a Chuckle
Like it or not, haunting images of the poor and sick, still raise money.
“Pity and shame are easy emotional levers to pull,” said Jennifer Lentfer, communications expert at Thousand Currents, a grant-making organization that supports grassroots initiatives. “They are proved to bring in the dollars.”
But SAIH’s Anja Bakken Riise thinks humor can be similarly effective.
“The best way of getting people to think is by making people to laugh,” she said. “Humor and surprise [are] great. It makes people let their guard down. It’s like giving a gift. And if you give me a gift, I want to give you something back.”
Humor has certainly worked for SAIH. They followed up their initial “Radi-Aid” video with several more spoof videos including one called “Let’s Save Africa — Gone Wrong” and “Who Wants to Be a Volunteer?” based off the popular television game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Each video has had more than one million views on YouTube. In late 2017, SAIH launched an animated satirical campaign educating overseas volunteers on how to be more culturally sensitive with their social media use.
SAIH’s satirical campaigns have earned recognition across the political spectrum. Martin Morse Wooster, senior fellow at the conservative Capital Research Institutes admits, “I wouldn’t normally pay much attention to this group, but the video they created, ‘Africa for Norway,’ is brilliant.
“The message is quite clear,” he continues. “Videos where white people go to the Third World and save helpless black people send the wrong message.”
SAIH’s Bakken Riise attributed much of the group’s success to their use of humor to engage their audience.
“Humor challenges apathy,” she said. “It gets your mind working.”
Jennifer Golden has been working in the field of international communications for nearly two decades. Outside the office, she is a writer and blogger whose work has been featured in the Washington Post, Scary Mommy, and The Best Women’s Travel Writing (2007), and she was the recipient of a scholarship to the Aspen Words literary festival in 2017.
