Procrastination at its Finest: Nonprofits final paper

As I sit here in one of Bloomington's local coffee shops finishing one of my final papers, I came to a realization.

I haven't updated my blog in forever. And this isn't because I've been lazy.

Let's just say between homework, class, being a faculty assistant, and dealing with anything else that comes up with school, I've been a bit busy.

I'll update in the next few days about my Spring semester adventures, but for now, thought I'd post some of my recent work. We'll start with something that I started AND finished all in a day's work: my nonprofit class final paper.

For this, we basically had to analyze a nonprofit's media coverage over the course of the semester. I chose The Humane Society of the United States, and focused on the coverage of HSUS dealing with criticisms from the Center for Consumer Freedom - another nonprofit group.

It's pretty interesting, and I will post it below in case you are interested. Feel free to let me know what you think or to just leave general comments about it!

More updates to follow soon.

The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) is the largest animal advocacy organization in the nation, having over 10.6 million members. Founded in 1954, the nonprofit HSUS addresses animal welfare issues and attempts to end animal cruelty through political means and legislation. While the HSUS does not run local shelters or oversee local animal care, they do provide assistance to shelters in the form of suggested training programs, shelter standards, and outreach services, among others.[1] The group's current major campaigns target five issues, including factory farming, animal fighting, the fur trade, puppy mills, and wildlife abuse. The HSUS founders decided that its purpose would be to confront national cruelties that local societies and state federations could not.

In spring 2004, HSUS appointed Wayne Pacelle as CEO and President. A former executive director of The Fund for Animals, he spent a decade as The HSUS’s chief lobbyist and spokesperson. Pacelle is heavily committed to expanding the organization’s base of support as well as its influence on public policies affecting animals. As a vegan, he has faced some criticism from the public regarding him wanting to dictate people’s lifestyle and food choices. However, he has claimed that he only intends to inform the public about the billions of animals killed each year for consumption.

“I think it is important to give people more eating options,” Pacelle said in an interview on satyamag.com.[2] “That’s why we’re now doing a guide to vegetarian eating, to really make the case for it and try to make that transition easier.”

Since Pacelle’s appointment, the HSUS has been successful in many different ways. For example, they have exposed an international trophy hunting scam that was ended through reform and have also made progress in outlawing animal fighting, among other successes.

Over the first few months of 2010, the nonprofit organization Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) has been featured in the news for various reasons similar to these past successes—for celebrating the rescue of animals from desperate conditions in early March and in other months[3], honoring news programs that advocated animal protection in late March[4], and for offering rewards to people who could provide information on poachers in early April.[5] The nonprofit even received positive coverage in late January regarding them helping and rescuing stray dogs after the Haiti earthquake.[6] While these recent media coverage examples represent the nonprofit’s positive societal contributions, a large majority of this nonprofit’s media coverage over the past few months has revolved around attacks from an agriculture industry-backed nonprofit Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF). Formerly called the “Guest Choice Network,” CCF was created in 1995 by lobbyist Rick Berman and is a front group for the restaurant, alcohol, tobacco and other industries. Its advisory board is comprised mainly of representatives from the restaurant, meat and alcoholic beverage industries. Ever since its creation, Berman has campaigned against reforms that would lower legal alcohol levels for drivers and ban smoking in public places, for example. Nearly a decade ago, the HSUS began to see these attacks aimed at them, since the CCF has a history of attacking organizations whose work focuses on animal agriculture and food industry reform.

Through posting press releases and information on both its Web site and newest arm, Humanewatch.org, CCF has attempted to expose HSUS’ alleged wrongdoings, such as HSUS supposedly only giving less than one percent of its funds to local animal shelters.[7] This negative coverage of HSUS seemed to, at times, “drown out” any of the animal welfare group’s positive headlines. When viewing online news articles about HSUS’ attempt to change legislation for the better with discovering abuse by U.S. egg producers in April[8], for example, it was easy to also run across articles by the CCF that turned these seemingly positive headlines into negative ones.

The CCF’s frequent posting of anti-HSUS news releases has resonated with many different news outlets. Thus, this organization has been able to get its message out in many different ways other than just posting news releases on their site and on the Internet. Frequent Web sites that publish CCF’s anti-HSUS material include CattleNetwork.com, Des Moines Register, High Plains/Midwest AG Journal, Yankton Daily Press and other smaller publications. Some of these, like Cattlenetwork.com and High Plains Journal, are clearly pro-agriculture and will thus print material that mirrors this philosophy. Other larger, more well-known outlets such as The New York Post and USA Today have also picked up some anti-HSUS messages from the CCF and humanewatch.org. These mainstream outlets are basically warning readers to “beware” of donating to certain groups such as the HSUS, with USA Today, in March, citing CCF’s claim that the “HSUS gives less than one-half of one percent of its $100 million budget to hands-on pet shelters[9],” and with The New York Post citing in February the same information to also question HSUS’ truthfulness.[10]

Aside from picking up press releases and repurposing them into news stories for their outlet, some publications have even run anti-HSUS messaging in the form of advertisements. For example, on Feb. 23, 2010, The New York Times ran a full-page advertisement with the headline: “Shouldn’t the Humane Society Do Better?”[11] The advertisement described, similar to the many news stories around this time, how HSUS does not give money to local pet shelters as it claims it does. Instead, the advertisement claims, the nonprofit gives this donated money to its employees’ pension plans—$2.5 million worth. One of the more recent CCF attacks on the HSUS involves them disclosing HSUS’ rating from the well-known nonprofit watchdog Charity Navigator. The watchdog group heavily criticized HSUS, downgrading their rating from “four stars” to just three on April 1, 2010.[12] This grade is supposed to reflect how well nonprofit organizations spend their money, with fewer stars being assigned to those less-responsible groups. This particular message was, like other attacks from CCF, picked up by several small news organizations. Some outlets were pro-agriculture publications that clearly wanted their messages to reflect their audience’s preferences and interests.

While it is clear that many anti-HSUS themes have been displayed on different news outlet Web sites, it is important to consider any effects it has had on the animal welfare nonprofit in terms of responding to attacks. HSUS Senior Policy Advisor Bernard Unti believes that, while CCF generally spreads its messages quite easily, the animal welfare nonprofit isn’t as threatened as it may seem. He said that HSUS is more concerned with stories from “mainstream media”—larger newspaper or broadcast entities, for example. Thus, pro-agriculture and food industry publications aren’t the biggest of their worries when they are carrying attack messages about HSUS. When these messages appear in larger organizations—like they did in The New York Times advertisement, for example—he said that they are more diligent in focusing efforts to counter them in some way. While he did recognize that the overall effects are bad for their nonprofit when the public is exposed to CCF statements, he also said that they are pretty certain not many people are even reading those publications. Moreover, he said, HSUS’ main target audience does not even include those in the pro-agriculture publications. Thus, Unti and the HSUS are more concerned with the larger outlets that have a widespread audience more likely to mirror the nonprofit’s audience.

Given the fact that, in general, HSUS feels that it should only be concerned with anti-HSUS messages in larger publications, Unti said that they carefully consider any attack countermoves and only use them when absolutely necessary. Instead of taking jabs every time an attack is fired at them, Unti said that, instead, they are focused on publicizing the positive aspects about their nonprofit organization.

“We aren’t in the business to answer critics, but to advance the goals of promoting animal welfare,” Unti said in a phone interview. “We don’t want to dignify those critics by putting the stuff front and center.”

An example of the HSUS attempting to “drown out” the negative publicity by groups like CCF is Pacelle’s blog post about how, on the day that CCF announced its full-page New York Times advertisement criticizing the HSUS for not helping pets, the HSUS’ Emergency Services unit seemed to do just that—help pets[13]. The nonprofit’s Emergency Services unit rescued 80 dogs and 13 cats from a single wide trailer in Virginia.

In essence, Unti and the HSUS feel that by constantly responding to these criticisms and attacks, HSUS would be giving even more unnecessary negative attention to themselves. Instead of constantly getting absorbed in these attacks, HSUS has reminded people of their many accomplishments throughout their long history. Another example of the HSUS responding to attacks while still focusing on positive aspects of the organization involves a blog post by Pacelle on Feb. 23, 2010 titled “Follow the Money.[14] Within this post, Pacelle responds directly to CCF’s claims in their New York Times advertisement while also reminding people about HSUS’ good deeds. At the end of the post, though, he made sure to sum up why CCF frequently attacks the popular animal welfare advocate.

“They are bothering us because, by threatening animal abuse, we are threatening their bottom line,” Pacelle said in this blog post.

Within their main Web site, humanesociety.org, a whole section is devoted to posting information about how and why opponents attack their group. Most links on here directly refer to Pacelle’s blog, allowing the president to represent the nonprofit as a whole. While many of their press releases don’t seem to be widely spread to news outlets—like the CCF’s—the HSUS feels that they are getting the job done by posting counterattacks on their Web site and blog.

“We’re like the Microsoft of animals,” Unti said. “Our Web site becomes sort of a newspaper for us and we want to make sure we use it.”

While HSUS is widely known among most people, it does make one wonder about the effectiveness of this conservative strategy—relying on their Web site to get messages across. While CCF continually and frequently publishes their anti-HSUS messages across the Web, it seems that HSUS’ response to these many criticisms haven’t been as widespread—at least across news outlets. For the most part, their releases are simply posted on their main Web site or blog. Throughout the past four months that the CCF has criticized HSUS, any mention of this issue between the two groups has usually put the HSUS in a negative light—and not the CCF. Aside from the many news articles cited above, an article from kansascity.com on Mar. 27, 2010 is also an example of CCF giving readers a negative perception of the HSUS.[15] Most of the time, the title of these articles alone provide negative connotations to HSUS, as well. Moreover, the fact that most of HSUS’ news coverage within the past four months has been about the ongoing conflict with CCF paints HSUS as “problematic” and always “in conflict.”

Aside from carefully and strategically responding to criticisms through both its Web site and blog, HSUS also relies on the Internet and social networking to speak out about their organization in positive and productive ways. HSUS has a presence on Facebook with its “fan page,” along with links and other fan pages of its corporate sponsors. But Unti said this can be both positive and negative for them in terms of who has access to these postings. He said that some anti-HSUS people have attacked Facebook fan pages of both HSUS and its corporate sponsors, including Yellowtail Wine.

“They [corporate sponsors] didn’t sign on for conflict,” Unti said. “They are simply interested in selling their product.”

While HSUS has dealt with CCF and its arm, humanewatch.org, constantly criticizing them for the past four months and beyond, the animal welfare nonprofit, in my opinion, has responded effectively—for the most part. I believe that their conservative strategy of researching any criticizers and deciding when and how to respond is justified and logical. It doesn’t make much sense to constantly post counterattacks to its Web site and blog, possibly causing even more negative attention to be cast upon them. Moreover, with many of the news outlets being either very small or pro-agriculture/food, the widespread coverage of CCF’s criticisms don’t seem to have a huge negative impact on HSUS. Unti even believes that some of these criticisms are good for the company since it tells them just how powerful they are in eliciting these kinds of attacks.

“In a certain sense, we want to have enemies like this,” he said. “We believe no one would be wasting or spending money on these attacks if we were not actually effective in what we are doing.”

With that said, I also believe that the HSUS could be doing more to respond to these attacks. While I think it is smart and in their best interest to carefully craft and consider their responses to criticism, I think this can be done differently. Firstly, despite many outlets that pick up CCF criticisms being small and consisting of a different audience than HSUS, these negative releases still are more widespread than HSUS’ press releases in general and, thus, pose a problem for HSUS. While Unti and HSUS seem to think CCF may not have much weight and are not getting that much tracking, I still think that the HSUS would benefit from responding more often in responsible, careful ways. Basically, if they responded a bit more aggressively to where their releases would be picked up closer to the extent of CCF’s, I think that readers would be more likely to see both sides of the story and, thus, form their own opinion about the HSUS vs. CCF debate—instead of only reading or hearing news stories repurposed from CCF news releases. While it is true that bigger outlets, like The USA Today, did present both sides of this issue in their article, it was, as many of the news articles were, based off of a CCF release against HSUS.

Thus, if I were a public relations manager for this large and well-known animal welfare nonprofit, I would simply provide more press releases in response to both positive and negative remarks about the organization. I think it’s important that people see HSUS as trying to “set the record straight”—in a professional and responsible manner, of course. I believe this can be done without being too overly aggressive or acting out of line with most people’s beliefs of how nonprofits should react and behave.

After all, Unti said that people expect more out of nonprofits.

“We are a charity, and people don’t think of a charity as being ‘too belligerent and aggressive,’” he said. “I think they have a different expectation in accordance to our values.”

It is clear that, from citing the recent media coverage of the largest and most well-known animal advocacy group in the nation, HSUS seems to work more reactively than proactively with the media. With most recent news stories about the HSUS focusing on the issues with CCF, the HSUS has felt a need to strategically respond through both its Web site and blog in the hopes that people will be better informed about their mission. While these responses weren’t displayed by mainstream media outlets, HSUS nonetheless has posted many news items directly in response to these criticisms—whether through their own Web site or through the smaller news outlets that did pick up CCF’s remarks. Moreover, HSUS has been frequently interviewed by reporters specifically for comment on this issue, forcing them to reactively respond.

As far as establishing credibility and building a good relationship with reporters, it seems that HSUS could do a bit better in this regard. This is especially evident when examining articles from USA Today and The New York Post—two larger newspapers—in their coverage of the HSUS and CCF issue. While these reporters may quote people from both sides of the issue, they also provide context that enables readers to negatively associate HSUS with supposedly overpaying executives instead of putting money toward local animal shelters. Thus, HSUS needs to establish better credibility with the media in order to get their side of their story across more effectively—and not just through their own Web site and blog.

With respect to the ongoing issue with CCF, HSUS faces numerous media challenges. The first clear one involves determining how they will get their message and side of the story to the CCF issue across more frequently and, thus, more effectively. More widespread responses from the HSUS would ultimately benefit them long-term. The second challenge they face is acknowledging CCF in general. While Unti stated that this hasn’t been the largest issue they have faced, CCF has certainly made their presence known—especially though the Internet. Thus, HSUS must constantly always have CCF on their radar, so to speak. Lastly, I believe they face the challenge of simply getting more stories—both positive and negative—across mainstream news outlets. While many stories about the HSUS offering rewards for missing animals or recognizing animal rights exist, not many stories seem to be in major outlets. However, with challenges come opportunities. The HSUS has the opportunity to inform the public about their actual mission and goals instead of allowing industry-baked groups to claim otherwise. This could, eventually, not only establish good credibility with reporters, but also with supporters.

Overall, I think that the media acts first and foremost as a “watchdog” to the HSUS in that it has frequently published CCF’s remarks about their supposed wrongdoings. The media has especially tried to reinforce this “watchdog” role with reporting on nonprofit watchdog groups’ criticisms of HSUS (like The Charity Navigator articles). Aside from this role, I also feel that the media act as an “agenda setter” in that they attempt to define what is news for HSUS. While they do publish the many successes HSUS has had from time to time, they seem to more frequently publish HSUS material in light of conflicts—either involving CCF’s complaints or any skepticism of the public. In turn, this causes HSUS to be more reactive than proactive, particularly with the CCF debate. Since HSUS act more reactive with the media, they attempt to respond in ways in which their supporters will relate to and understand. Essentially, by “drowning out” the negative story angles about them, they are attempting to be agenda setters as well. This creates an ongoing battle between HSUS, CCF, and the news media in general that is likely to last for some time.

While Unti stated that HSUS has been confident and strategic in their responses to CCF criticism, he also said that the organization is always considering new ways to respond.

“There is a challenge to develop responses in proportion to what were facing, and I still think were figuring this out in this situation,” Unti said.

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[1] How is the HSUS Affiliated With Your Local Humane Society? http://www.humanesociety.org/animal_community/resources/facts/HSUS_local_shelters.html

[2] Saya June/July 05: Interview with Wayne Pacelle of the HSUS: http://www.satyamag.com/jun05/pacelle.html

[3] More Than 100 Cats Rescued From Grainger County Home: http://www.volunteertv.com/news/headlines/86722622.html

[4] Animals Are Big Winners at Humane Society’s Genesis Awards: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/unleashed/2010/03/humane-society-genesis-awards-tippi-hedren.html

[5] New Reward Offered For Information On Poachers Who Killed 3 Deer Near Carson City: http://www.rgj.com/article/20100407/NEWS/100407005/-1/CARSON/New-reward-offered-for-information-on-poachers-who-killed-3-deer-near-Carson-City

[6] Lucky Dogs Rescued After Katrina, Now Haiti: http://www.usatoday.com/life/lifestyle/pets/2010-01-27-haitipets27_ST_N.htm

[7] Nationwide Poll: Seven Out of Ten Americans Wrongly Believe the Humane Society of the United States is a Pet-Shelter "Umbrella Group: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/nationwide-poll-seven-out-of-ten-americans-wrongly-believe-the-humane-society-of-the-united-states-is-a-pet-shelter-umbrella-group-85945152.html

[8] Humane Society finds abuse by U.S. egg producers:

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63656A20100407;

[9] USA Today - Pet donations: What to know before you contribute: http://content.usatoday.com/communities/pawprintpost/post/2010/03/pet-donations-what-to-know-before-you-contribute/1

[10] New Watchdog for Humane Society: http://www.nypost.com/p/sports/more_sports/new_watchdog_for_humane_society_rG2CFptgfxKKDE9MMPo00O

[11] The New York Times anti-HSUS advertisement sponsored by the CCF: http://humanewatch.org/index.php/site/post/new_york_times_ad_shouldnt_the_humane_society_do_better/

[12] Charity Navigator downgrade of HSUS: http://humanewatch.org/index.php/site/post/breaking_charity_navigator_downgrades_hsus_ratings/

[13] HSUS blog: Nearly 100 Victims of Animal Hoarding Rescued in Virginia: http://hsus.typepad.com/wayne/2010/04/va-hoarding.html

[14] HSUS blog – Follow the Money: http://hsus.typepad.com/wayne/2010/02/ccf-ad.html

[15]Kansascity.com: Humane Society’s compassion stirs conflict with agribusiness in Midwest: http://www.kansascity.com/2010/03/27/1840767/humane-societys-compassion-stirs.html