Give money or the polar bear gets it

The link (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_gTBDFTXE0) is to an old interview with Paul Watson, co-founder of Greenpeace and founder of the Sea Shepherd Society. It provides a timeless and very accurate inside view of how marketing when in conflict with empiricism can distort both the message and incentives of professionalised advocacy groups. In the long run, such behaviour discredits credible groups, shifts resources away from where they can provide the most good while providing a good living for the minority in control of that organisation. Since 1978 this phenomenon has increased in numbers and intensity through the internet and social media with the drop in marketing costs and rise in fundamentalism as people find it ever-easier to reside within their own at-times very distorted and intolerant world views. 
There was a previous blog regarding the definition of ‘Do No Harm’; another way of looking at this phrase is to see it as a repudiation of tactics and messages which may be financially successful but which are at odds with what in the long run really works or what doesn’t in the developmental sense. Poverty porn, ‘Kony’, donating T-shirts etc. and the organisations behind them are the aid equivalents of how the needs of the organisation and those in control take over the raison d’etre of a worthy purpose.