I wonder if they're embarrassed? A recent post in Ads of the World shows dozens of Help Japan posters. Looking at these posters, you might think there'd been a design contest that had these rules:
- Make a clever visual pun about the disaster, using the Japanese flag as the main visual reference.
- Make the call to action incredibly tiny, or have none at all.
There was no such contest. This is what a bunch of designers came up with independently. And that says a lot.
Now it's not quite fair to label all of these Stupid Nonprofit Ads, because most have no reference to any specific nonprofit organization. They are almost purely works of design, not marketing. I'm guessing a lot are the work of students.
But darn it, the abstraction, the emptiness, the lack of connection with the human world these ads display, along with their utter lack or originality masquerading as creativity really makes them all look like classic Stupid Nonprofit Ads!
Stupid Nonprofit Ads tend to be design driven, rather than strategy-, communication-, or knowledge-driven. And the flag of Japan is designer bait. Its bold, minimalistic design must be just irresistible. So much more exciting than actual humans or specific scenes that might communicate any emotional content.
Communicating human suffering by showing a flag is not only lazy, but it's false. The Flag of Japan took no injury; individual people in Japan have suffered and died. That's the whole point, the entire reason anyone is talking about the disaster. (There's a similar popular genre of Stupid Ads that attempt depict suffering in Africa by showing punny maps of Africa. You can see a whole lot of these here.)
Here are just a few of the many, many, Help Japan posters you can see at Ads of the World:
Even a properly designed poster is not very smart fundraising. Posters don't reach the right people in the right ways. So designing a poster at all is an act of design self-indulgence. Which is pretty much what's happening with most Stupid Nonprofit Ads.
If you want to get people to give, you have no choice but to enter the world of flesh and blood humans who are driven by their emotions, who want real connections with other real people. The real designers, the ones who truly get it, know this and excel at it.
Jeff Brooks has been serving the nonprofit community for more than 30 years and blogging about it since 2005. He considers fundraising the most noble of pursuits and hopes you'll join him in that opinion. You can reach him at jeff [at] jeff-brooks [dot] com. 
