You've probably seen this ice-bucket challenge for ALS. When it first started going around, it really looked like people were missing the point: that is, people were having fun, and keeping the trend going, but not really putting much effort into raising/donating money. A lot of the challenge videos - even those from celebrities who should know better - didn't even bother mentioning ALS or telling viewers where they could donate. This seemed to be the dot-com of charity campaigns: popular and fun, but with little consideration for how it was actually going to make money.
And yet it actually is making money. ALS donations are way up. Thinking about it, you can understand how that works: ALS isn't one of the bigger diseases, so it probably doesn't get a ton of donations. But then it gets a huge, trendy, society-wide trend. So even if that trend only gets a tiny percentage of its audience to donate, that will still produce far more money than they usually get. Again, there's a technology comparison: businesses like Twitter are widely used, but only make a little bit of money - if any - from each user. It's a different approach than most businesses, which would try to make more money off each user, say by charging each user a fee. Similarly, the ice-bucket challenge doesn't use a more obvious money-making plea to each participant, say the way a telethon would. It relies on a small amount of money from a large number of people.
It's interesting, and it would be nice to believe that every cause could work that way. But when I think of all the charities in the world, and multiply it by the cultural impact of the ice-bucket challenge, I'm not sure we have room in society for that much unfocused fun.
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