By itself, this Wall of Hands campaign for the Australian Literacy and Numeracy Foundation isn't stupid enough to get my attention.
It's far, very far, from smart. It suffers from a deadly level of abstraction: It's a campaign to help improve literacy among indigenous Australian kids in a specific community. So far, so good. But rather than get specific about the need and its solution, they collapse it all into one ambiguous symbolic act: raise your hand.
Okay. Hand raised.
Boy do I feel better.
High concept, low communication. This is a common problem in fundraising when you don't pay attention to what it really takes to motivate people to give.
But here's where the real stupidity of this campaign really balloons out to newsworthy levels. You can read about it at B&T, and Australian ad-industry publication here: Charity raises outdoor and digital advertising.
A lot of outdoor advertising is being donated to the Wall of Hands, including whiz-bang interactive touch screens that allow people to "raise their hands" in shopping malls:
Shoppers can use the screens to take pictures of themselves raising their hands in support of the campaign with supporters able to share their photo on the big screen.
The value of all that donated space: $1.6 million. The fundraising goal: $40,000. That's a return-on-investment of 0.025, or 2-1/2¢ for every dollar. (And that's just the value of the donated space. There are a lot of other costs.
(A more recent comment on the story claims that the correct fundraising goal is instead $400,000. That lifts the expected ROI to a majestic 0.25. I'm just guessing here, but I bet the $40,000 is the more accurate one.)
In other words, this campaign is projected to be a complete waste of time and effort. It's just an exercise in creativity, using a worthy cause to prop itself up.
You might say, "Why sniff at $40,000 free from the campaign? No harm done, and some meaningful good will happen."
That's only if you don't count time wasted by the charity, opportunity lost because they're doing this instead of something that would actually raise serious funds, and the terrible cost of making meaningless noise in the marketplace.
It's another shameful example of the ad industry taking a nonprofit to the cleaners -- and being thanked all the way.
Thanks to alert reader Clarke Vincent of Pareto Fundraising for the tip.
More Stupid Nonprofit Ads.
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. 
