Statistics Do Not Move Money

A charity that helps the same people A.A. helps has to raise money before the quarter closes, and the appeal needs one story. Statistics do not move money. A person does. So somebody who got well is asked for four paragraphs, and he writes them gladly, because the charity did help him and he wants it to survive. The appeal goes out with his photograph, his first name, and the sentence that makes the whole thing work: he found sobriety in Alcoholics Anonymous. Every word of it is true. Nobody has claimed A.A. supports the charity. But that letter now carries A.A.'s name as the guarantor of an outcome it is selling, inside a document whose only purpose is to produce a donation — and A.A.'s name is doing the part of the job the charity's own record could not do by itself. The Tradition warns against "sensational advertising," which sounds antique until you notice what advertising is: somebody else's message, with our credibility loaned to it, working.