It’s a love fest!

Starbucks, in partnership with RED, recently announced a plan to have musicians in 156 countries participate in a Global Sing-along, which produced this totally adorable video:

What does this have to do with the price of (coffee) beans? The All-You-Need-is-Love fest is part of a giant global plan to save the continent of Africa from dying of AIDS (and also maybe sell some coffee and reap the marketing benefits of associating their brand with the compassionate, virtuous, saving Africa image).

If you spend $15 at Starbucks, they’ll give you a CD with above song on it (supplies limited!), and donate a dollar to the Global Fund.  It gets more convoluted from there: Go online to the Starbucks love website and draw a cutesy love card to trigger another donation from Starbucks to the Global Fund, this time of 5 cents. Finally, if you upload a video facing your computer camera and singing goofily along to the Beatles classic, Starbucks will toss the GF another nickel.

It's almost enough to make you forget that if you bypassed Starbucks all together and just donated your $15 bucks to the Global Fund you’d be helping…15 times more.

Product (RED): from ridicule to dialogue

This blog has ridiculed the RED campaign from all possible angles. We’ve questioned whether creating a few pennies of aid through buying a corporate product is worth all the hype, criticized the murky finances of the legal entity behind RED, and gone after RED co-founder Bono with jibes, fake awards and parodies. Displaying exceptional cool in the face of this mockery, Bobby Shriver, the other co-founder of RED, met me for a coffee. He could have gone all angry and defensive and preachy about His Great Initiative (which others in his place have done). Instead, he asked for suggestions on how to improve RED.

In response to my suggestion that RED source more products from Africa, he pointed to the “From Africa To Africa” coffee from Starbucks and said they had apparently not done enough to advertise they were already doing that. He also said he was open to discussing it more. I think RED marketing to support self-help by African entrepreneurs to sell in the US would be brilliant. (I have to report that the RED coffee I tried was OK, but nowhere near the Tomoca Coffee I purchased in Ethiopia – the best coffee I have ever had but difficult to buy outside Ethiopia.)

I too tried to be open-minded. He understands the politics of advocacy much better than I do: “You’ve got to get them talking about the cause at the Pig Roast” (the typical fund-raising event for a congressional candidate). Let’s give Shriver and RED credit for raising awareness of AIDS in Africa, not to mention of African poverty in general (although I’m sticking to my argument that the Bono/RED approach has led to some paternalistic and misguided remedies to those problems.)

Is ridicule a good way to promote dialogue? I don’t know. I don’t believe in “why can’t we all just get along” rather than debate. There are already plenty of people using aid-establishment-speak to talk politely around the issues—blunt critiques and satire can be useful to break that spell. Shriver also deserves credit for hearing the criticism and still being willing to engage in dialogue. I am wondering if sometimes I should look harder for dialogue before the satire starts.

Can Starbucks Buy a “Saving Africa” Image for a Nickel?

I was curious about what the going rate is these days for attracting customers who want to save Africa. Five cents was a little lower than I expected.

How much money is flowing to Africa from this? Aid Watch’s exclusive investigation consisted of asking about seven Starbucks cashiers around Greenwich Village how often they processed the Starbucks Red card, with its payoff of five cents for Africa per use. All except one cashier said it was rare to see them, maybe 1 or 2 in an 8-hour day. The one exception said they saw them about 10 times a day. So we have a payoff for Africa of between 5 and 10 cents per day per Starbucks cashier, with one outlier of 50 cents a day. This sample is obviously ridiculously unscientific, but perhaps it can attain the status of an anecdote.

The only excuse for my pitiful attempt at estimating RED card revenues is that I think it is really up to Starbucks to disclose to its customers how much money is really flowing to the Global Fund for AIDS in Africa. We are in luck -- Starbucks has a cool (RED) web site that actually documents in real time how many people are buying with the (RED) card (11,115!), how many Starbucks products they are buying (87,257), and how many days of AIDS medicine that translates into (10,146!).

OOPS, sorry, I misunderstood it. This is just a record of how many people have signed up online worldwide (11,115) to join the Starbucks RED campaign, how many Starbucks products they have pledged to buy, and how much that translates into in days of medicine. There is no verification that anyone actually buys the card or keeps their pledge. Even if they did, this would translate into a rather underwhelming contribution of $4,362.85 to the Global Fund. It’s not Starbucks’ fault that their customers don’t show much interest in the RED card, but Starbucks benefits even so.

Bill Gates celebrated the RED campaign as an example of what he sees as world-systemic change towards “creative capitalism,” where companies will respond to “reputational” philanthropic incentives as well as conventional profit ones. Yet if companies can obtain the RED branding, the Saving Africa reputation, for virtually nothing, just how strong is the incentive to give?