In August 2014 Twitter feeds, Facebook
walls, and television screens were filled with celebrities and ordinary people
dousing themselves with buckets of icy water. The viral trend had been started
in America to raise money and awareness for Amytrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS,
also known as Lou Gherig’s Disease and Motor Neurone Disease). Millions of
people participated in the challenge, which raised over $220 million in America
and much more elsewhere.
However, the charity sector was not
unanimous in celebrating the challenge as an example of modern fundraising and
campaigning success. Many commented that the challenge was a fad, was failing
to produce sustained interest in disease research, was making people feel good
about themselves for relatively little effort (“slacktivism”, “clicktivism”), or
was cannibalising donations, diverting gifts that would have been given anyway
from more deserving causes to ALS.
There were other critiques: that this
was a callous waste of water, that ALS was a disease of minor importance when
several African countries were experiencing an Ebola epidemic of historic
proportions, and simply that people were sharing the videos and taking the
challenge without donating money or educating themselves. These can now be
addressed in turn.
The boost in funding has now delivered
intermediate results. The American ALS Association received 13 times more
contributions than in a normal year and distributed them among six research
projects. Work by Project MinE, which involved 80 researchers in 11 countries
mapping the genomes of over 15,000 people, has identified a new gene which
contributes to the disease, NEK1. This discovery is a step towards better
treatments and a possible cure. Barbara Newhouse, the American ALS CEO, told
the New Yorker “We’re seeing research
that’s really moving the needle not just on the causes of the disease but also
on treatments and therapies.”
This shows there are tangible results
from people’s donations. The level of fundraising success was a story in
itself, but the positive consequences arising from spending that money has
public relations value for the whole charity sector two years later, confirming
in donors’ minds the validity of contributing to charities that focus on
research rather than services or direct giving. Project MinE received under one
tenth of the funds raised, meaning other breakthroughs could arise from other
scientific work.
Other criticisms are contradictory. The
fact that there was an Ebola outbreak in 2014 simply means that more should
have been done, and should be done, to encourage support for tropical disease
charities. It is an invalid argument to suppose that just because it is sad one
cause is being ignored, other causes too should be.
According to Giving USA, donations in
the US rose almost 6% in 2014, which implies there was no cannibalism effect.
At a rough estimate, about $12 was raised per video uploaded, suggesting that
for every individual who made a video but failed to donate, there were many
more who contributed. The English language version of Wikipedia saw views on its
ALS page leap 18 times higher than normal, with similar increases in Spanish
and German versions. It would be churlish to deny that the challenge raised
awareness and understanding of the disease.
In awareness terms, the ice bucket
challenge was also a success in starting the very conversation of which this
blog is a part. Major newspapers and websites featured countless think pieces
and debates on the relative impact of different charities, on what individuals’
strategies for giving ought to be, and how social media could or should be used
by charities in the future. It is wrong to disparage the campaign for its
primary focus on celebrity and fun — without this focus, there probably would
have been no story at all, and no conversation. Moreover, the challenge engaged
under 30s, the demographic that the third sector typically struggles to enthuse
for volunteering or donation.
We can see reflections of the success in
recent attempts to capture the enthusiasm of the 2014 craze. This year, mental
health advocates in America and Britain are consciously trying to recreate the ice
bucket challenge with the “22 push-up challenge” campaign, which has three admirable aims.
First, to raise awareness that’s 22 military veterans take their own lives each
day, second, to raise funding for mental health support, and third, to promote
public fitness in a participatory, mutually supportive manner. It has already
delivered stories in the Sun, Daily
Telegraph, Daily Mirror and the BBC.
While it may not have been perfect, the
ice bucket challenge shows the potential of social media for fundraising in an
engaging way. It does not appear to have had the negative effects or attributes
that critics feared, and indeed has begun to deliver results.
