NFL/World Vision Part II?
Posted on February 5, 2012 at 12:04 pm
I’m interested in whether or not the NFL will again donate the 100,000 items with logo of the team that lost the SuperBowl to World Vision.
Last year’s donation ignited a huge debate that got World Vision into a public image nightmare. To see the list of 70 blog posts written on the topic as well as links to World Vision’s responses see this blog’s post Tracking the World Vision/NFL Shirt Donation Controversy.
I personally wrote several posts on the topic including:
World Vision, the next 100,000 shirts
An example of why the percent spent on administration is meaningless
Explaining the radio silence over World Vision
The World Vision controversy continues –
How much are the NFL shirts worth? World Vision isn’t saying
So I’m extremely curious to see if any of this had an impact on World Vision’s actions. Thus far I’ve only been able to find two articles related to the topic. The first is from Mental-floss stating:
“A representative for World Vision said they’re not sure where the donated Giants/Patriots gear will be going this year. Once they get the product and take inventory, they’ll get in touch with their foreign staff and see who needs what where.”
From this it looks like all the bad publicity from last year has not changed World Vision’s practices. It appears that the only change it may have had is on their PR approach. When asked about the clothing from the Bowl Championship Series World Vision had this to say:
World Vision could not confirm whether it will be receiving this year’s BCS apparel. A spokesperson for World Vision said the organization has gotten college bowl apparel in the past but could not comment further.
UPDATE:
So which countries will receive life saving donations of “World Champion New England Patriot” t-shirts this year?
Here’s World Vision’s blog post in response to this one World Vision and sports-related product donations
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Guides by Good Intentions are Not Enough
Good Intentions’ Guide to Holiday Charitable Giving
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« Peer Coaching • World Vision’s Addiction to SWEDOW »
I’m curious about World Vision’s structure in this case. This is clearly World Vision US, not all the other World Visions right? Does, say, World Vision UK ship premiership football jerseys to countries in which they work? Have you asked World Vision International what they have to say about it? Their annual reports and advertised positions and a presentation I saw at a conference, all WV international mind, points to evidence based programming for child well being. Will they show the evidence that shipping tshirts to Africa provides more/better child well being than any alternative (including the do nothing alternative of course)?
From my understanding, WV USA is the largest sender of goods, however it is also done by other WV, just not in the same quantities. During the controversy last year, Aid Watch asked WV to show proof of the impact of their programs. Here’s the blog post where their response is analyzed. http://aidwatchers.com/2011/03/world-vision-super-bowl-shirts-the-final-chapter/
As a spoiler, WV could not show proof of the positive impact of the programs or that it met their programmatic objectives.
Was it really a nightmare? Do you think very many people other than strange (I mean that in a nice way) bloggers and blog readers really paid much attention? Even the regular media coverage it got wasn’t really mainstream. Any half way intelligent person
can see that shipping surplus tshirts doesn’t help anyone very much and is clearly a PR
stunt. So the answer has to be that the motivations and rewards to world vision from doing it are positive. Which would mean someone is giving more to world vision because of this, or at least WV thinks this to be the case. Although that leads back to my assertion about half way intelligent people…
Arrrgggghhhh. I can’t believe they’re going to do it. again..
As tweeted by @bill_easterly: http://blog.worldvision.org/conversations/world-vision-and-sports-related-product-donations/
Which translates as “WorldVisionUSA knows best, so there”. Which probably means “WorldVisionUSA has too much invested in this relationship to consider changing it..”
[...] Want) in their development programs. According to their recent blog post in response to my previous post, they will continue to send clothing emblazoned with losing team logos from both the NFL and [...]
[...] there is apparently no update on World Vision’s website on this year’s Super Bowl gear, some statements made by WV officials suggest that the project is going on without any [...]