What Can NGOs Learn from the Great Canadian Newspaper War?

In 1998, Canada’s major newspapers went to war.

That was the year the National Post was launched, sparking a circulation battle with the Globe and Mail and the Star in Toronto.

It was a fierce fight. But instead of going to war against each other, they should have been focusing on a common enemy: The Internet.

That's the view of John Stackhouse, author of the new book Mass Disruption: Thirty Years on the Front Lines of the Media Revolution, 

In a chapter in the book titled, appropriately, “The Wrong War,” Stackhouse notes that the real fight was against Google and the other digital upstarts that aggregated and, later, created news and other content.

It’s not like newspapers weren’t warned about their real enemy. 

As early as 1992, Bob Kaiser of the Washington Post wrote about a visit to Apple and what he saw as the danger to newspapers of the coming digital world.

In a memo, Kaiser wrote that the Post needed to do two things immediately: Create electronic classifieds and publish an electronic edition.

“Both ideas,” Stackhouse writes, “were ignored.”

So why did newspapers fail to react and respond to this new enemy?

For one thing, life was pretty good for newspapers in the 1990s. They were one of the main ways people got news, and how advertisers reached the public. They were making lots of money.

For another, they had invested heavily in buildings, presses, shipping departments and work forces.

The result? When the online world took off, both for news and advertising, newspapers were left behind.

It didn't matter which newspaper won the printed circulation war; the battle was already lost as subscribers and advertisers drifted away to the new digital world.

What does this have to do with the international relief & development sector? 

Like newspapers in the 1990s, I think the sector is fighting the wrong war.

Instead of focusing on the big challenge of how to grab attention in this noisy world or expand the total number of Canadians who support relief and development, groups are fixated on how to address their own funding and communication challenges.

This is understandable; there are programs to be supported and staff to be paid.

The problem is we are fighting against each other, not against public indifference in general.

Of course, being non-profits, we don’t talk that way. We don’t speak about competing with other organizations.

But that is exactly what we are doing.

Worse, instead of expanding the overall donation pie, we are fighting for the attention and money of a small, and decreasing, number of givers.

According to a report in The Philanthropist, only about eight percent of total charitable giving in Canada goes for international purposes (very broadly defined).

And who is giving those funds? According to other research from the Canadian Centre for Philanthropy, the typical international donor is more likely to be older and to cite religious motivations for donating.

Since religious attendance in Canada is declining, especially among mainline churches, and since many donors are getting older, this should give all international NGOs pause. 

But instead of recognizing there is a problem, groups are busy using scarce resources to develop new and ambitious marketing and fundraising plans to either get traditional donors to give more, or to reach outside their donor base—to steal someone else's donor.

Instead of combining our efforts to make a larger splash in this noisy world of communications, most of our efforts hardly raise a peep outside our own little worlds.

In the end, like newspapers, we could find all these efforts are for nothing. We might hang on a little longer, but ultimately be defeated in the larger battle against public indifference. 

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that groups abandon their unique identities, missions or audiences.

I’m only suggesting that this might be a good time to come together to talk about creative ways to unite for a common cause and purpose—a United Way of international relief and development.

One group that is trying to do something like this is the Humanitarian Coalition, which is sponsoring the World Refugee Day campaign (June 20). 

Through it, the Coalition is trying to bring together NGOs to focus on the theme of refugees—with over 60 million displaced people in the world today, it is a huge crisis.

Maybe this experiment will work, maybe it won't. Or maybe it will spark new ideas for working together, instead of fighting the wrong war.