Companies (banks in particular) in dire need of good PR are falling head-over-heels to donate money to worthy disasters and the ‘disaster du jour’ is Haiti. Calamity sells and while giving money to worthy causes is never a bad thing; the reasons behind it can be rather more questionable.

Go to almost any company’s website at the moment and you will find a press release announcing a donation to the victims of the earthquake in Haiti. Now, trawl through the rest of the company’s press releases going back a year, or two, or even more and try to see if you can find anything similar? Probably not.

There will probably be nothing to show that the company is actively engaged with charities. One reason could be that the company does not feel the need to publicise its philanthropic activities, but another would be that it only makes donations when it can get the maximum amount of positive PR from the event.  

Mega-death events like Haiti do not come along very often. In fact, they don’t happen with any frequency even over the space of a decade, let alone every year. The last 10 years were exceptional by earthquake standards with a ‘big one’ (upwards of 20,000 dead) on average every two years, whereas previous decades barely had one big shock with a five figure death toll.

It makes sense (from a cynical PR perspective) to ride on the tails the big news story and get as much press coverage from the calamity as possible. The average disaster has a shelf life of about a week, but that depends on the body count. An average death toll of between 30,000 and 100,000 dead is good for about a week or 10 days, two weeks at a push if it is during a slow news time of the year, like the summer or the early New Year.

The tsunami of 2004 was highly unusual because it trashed paradise (tourist heaven Thailand) and provided the cameras with lots of high net worth corpses .i.e. rich, dead Westerners in a luxury location that had people digging deep because they could relate to the disaster, many having been there on holiday and others because the bodies looked like their own. Never mind that the worst of the damage was borne by the far reaches of Indonesia, a place that most people had never heard of. Donations for that disaster topped $7 billion.

Earthquakes tend to be a useful catastrophe from a positive PR point of view (unless you are the CEO of an insurance company which is heavily exposed to losses from it) because of their rarity, high-level media visibility and prime time TV audience. Earthquakes are also class-indifferent. The big ones flatten everything, not just the shanty towns. Wild weather (hurricanes/ cyclones and typhoons), by comparison, can usually be forecast, people moved to safety and damage minimised.   

Wars and other man-made disasters are a trickier sell, mainly because of the politics behind them. Taking sides can alienate potential customers with certain religious or political leanings. Famines, even those as a result of war, are becoming increasingly rare, even in Africa.

Earthquakes also tend to provide the cameras with lots of wailing babies, many of them orphaned after their parents were crushed under the rubble. Babies tend to have a greater chance of survival because they are smaller (easier to find in pockets of mangled buildings) and more physically robust, compared to adults. The last survivors to be pulled from the rubble up to two weeks after the quake are often kids, aka, good news. Nothing pulls at the heart strings like squealing tots and nothing sells like them either.

I am not against philanthropy. Quite the opposite. Many of the previous blogs have been arguing that more needs to be done by big corporations to help the needy, but sometimes it is hard not to be cynical when one gets the impression that some companies are simply trying to exploit the situation.

Donating to a good cause should always be commended, but not just for the big, once-in-a-blue-moon catastrophes. A company which is charity-savvy will have pet projects and will provide regular updates on donations and what they have achieved. Getting the staff involved with the charity is also a more cost-effective team-building exercise than sending the entire department off to some luxury resort for a week to play with plastic bricks.

Being charitable should be a year-round activity, not just when there is a high profile calamity.