Reversal of Fortunes: How to kill your cash cow the Komen way

Schools that teach marketing for nonprofits will undoubtedly use the recent Komen debacle as a case study in how to radically change your brand for worse in a matter of hours.  Komen’s decision to defund breast cancer screenings at Planned Parenthood has turned into an example of mismanagement as well as mangled message.  Komen was fairly well known by those that care as an institution more interested in marketing than its mission.  The ill-timed decision has undoubtedly brought some of its worse decisions out into the light of day.  My guess is that Komen will not be able to put its Humpty Dumpty foundation back together again.  Here are some of the reasons why.

Komen was in such a hurry to please some of its new associates that it obviously didn’t plan its response or gauge the backlash.  It underestimated the power of women and the power of social networking.  This comes when you listen to only one side and the Komen organization appears to have been listening to  right wing advocates that were more concerned about their own personal agendas than Komen’s broader mission.  They hired women that were part and parcel of the current war on women who pushed until Komen’s board broke. This should demonstrate that you really need to be careful with whom you climb into bed.

As heartening as the outpouring and the reversal has been, and as satisfying as it’s been on some level to watch Komen’s PR strategy implode, the initial decision is still bad news, and it comes after a year of bad policy. One of the primary items on the right-wing agenda since the GOP swept into Congress in 2010 has been to isolate, ostracize, harass and shame Planned Parenthood. They’ve tried to de-fund it at the federal and state levels and launched a bogus investigation. Planned Parenthood and all abortion providers are part of a never-ending paranoid obsession. Many bloggers have been comparing it to the Salem, Massachusetts hysteria, the kind of witch-hunt that taints everyone by association.

They’ve already succeeded in making abortion a pariah among medical procedures, the only one not funded by Medicaid, the only one hushed up and shunted aside. Now they’re trying to extend that blacklist to Planned Parenthood, and backlash aside, Komen’s move shows that this relentless campaign has met with some success.

Komen’s board must’ve become progressively insular.  This is something that is ill-advised when you’re a service organization that relies on the donations of a broad group of donors.  They removed their democratic lobbyist and lost their primary scientist. By doing this and hiring right wing activist and Quitterella pal, Karen Handel, Komen sealed their fate. No amount of protesting about the “unpolitical” nature of the defunding decision takes away the well-documented change in direction.  The press have found smoking pink guns in less than 48 hours.

Before Handel’s hiring, Komen’s lobbying shop was staunchly Democratic — from its head to its hired guns, former Democratic aides did most of the heavy lifting on everything from the breast cancer stamp to breast cancer research to its advocacy on the health care bill. And when their lead lobbyist, former Democratic staffer Jennifer Luray, quietly left in 2010, she took with her a six-figure severance package not in keeping with an employee that just found a new job.

At the time Handel was hired as a consultant — shortly after Luray left — Handel told the local magazine Northside Woman that Komen was her first and only client, and that her role was to “[work] with [the affiliates] to make sure they are as strong as they can be,” adding, “we’re making sure there’s a good relationship between the national group and the affiliate group [sic].” She told the Atlanta Trend last year, “Everybody understands that budgets are really, really tight in virtually every state. And that means that every program, no matter how worthwhile, is on the table to be scrutinized.” That would seem to belie Komen Foundation President Nancy Brinker’s assertion today that Handel wasn’t involved in the decision to end most affiliates’ grants to Planned Parenthood for breast cancer screenings, let alone her assertion that none of their decisions were “political.”

Interestingly, before Brinker took the reins of the organization itself and Handel came on board, Komen’s lobbyists had typically leaned to the left, especially since the Advocacy Alliance opened.

Now, the change in mission is clearly seen. We’re seeing the branding of pink hope hand guns and carcinogenic perfumes.  We’re reading about how Komen has started defunding stem cell research and hearing about the lobbying efforts made during the HCRA passage that indicated Komen did not have the interests of under-served women in mind.  Their brand is shot.

There has been plenty of controversy from Komen to date ranging from accusations they are denying links to cancer because of donations they receive to suing smaller organizations for using “for the cure” in their marketing. But they’ve weathered it because they’ve remained focused on what is and should be a completely non-partisan cause — preventing, treating and curing breast cancer. They’ve attracted women and men of all political stripes and backgrounds to their cause. It was a safe place for corporations to support the cause. Komen’s board thought they were simply cutting off a grant, for what many believe to be ideological reasons driven by Karen Handel, but what they were really doing is changing their entire mission. By taking a side in the abortion debate they essentially decided: we only want to work with men and women on the anti-abortion side of the debate, cutting off at least 50% if not more of their support.

I’d bet the board didn’t realize that’s what they were doing, but given that fact there’s no communications strategy that could have saved them. They could have handled things much better, but that was crossing the Rubicon for them. The lesson for nonprofits here is you have to always bring strategic decisions back to your mission and your supporters. How would they perceive it? Mission statements aren’t something top of mind every day and they usually aren’t something we can rattle off in an elevator. But that’s why they exist, to guide you as things like this come up.

Here’s one troubling account of other things Komen’s been up to.

Upon calling my GOP senator and speaking with his aide, I was shocked to hear her tell me “Sen.__ can’t sign on as a co-sponsor to the bill because all the breast cancer groups aren’t in agreement on it.”  Shocked, I asked her who was opposing it.  She told me that Komen opposed the bill. When I asked her why, she explained that Komen felt that treatment for uninsured breast cancer patients should be funded through private donations, like the pink ribbon race.  I was speechless, in shock.  A phone call to another activist confirmed it was true – Komen was lobbying behind the scenes to kill the bill.  A moment later, Sen.__’s aide called me back and begged me not to repeat our conversation to anyone, that she had given me the information by mistake.

Thus my lesson about Komen began in 2000. They spend a lot of money lobbying for a very different agenda.

The bill passed anyway and Bill Clinton, who pushed hard in Congress for its passage, was happy to sign it.  Unfortunately, it wasn’t the end of Komen (and its founder, Nancy Brinker’s) political maneuvering to stall or kill legislation in Congress and in state legislatures that was supported by other breast cancer advocacy groups.

They fought behind the scenes in my state to prevent the governor from adopting the Treatment Program.  They worked for several years to stall or kill the Breast Cancer & Environmental Research Act.  In the end, they eviscerated it by removing new funding for environmental research and substituting a panel to review all research on breast cancer & environment.  Using private funds, they recently collaborated with the Institute of Medicine to develop said report.  Released last December, it sadly detailed the same old arguments that there’s no evidence of links between environmental toxins and that no further research should be done on the subject since everyone has those toxins in their bodies already.  Instead they chose to blame breast cancer patients for getting the disease (more here).

They have also been accused of  “pinkwashing” the disease.

Many companies that raise funds for breast cancer also make products that are linked to the disease. Breast Cancer Action calls these companies “pinkwashers.” BMW, for example, gives $1 to Susan G. Komen for the Cure each time you test-drive one of their cars, even though pollutants found in car exhaust are linked to breast cancer. Many cosmetics companies whose products contain chemicals linked to breast cancer also sell their items for the cause.

The movie Pink Ribbons Inc will certainly be afforded more attention. Given its reputation for product placement over women, anti-choice agendas over science, and higher-than-expected salaries and overhead, it seems that Lady Karma has seen to it that Komen will never again be what it was.   What we need now is an alternative. As a survivor of a rare form of cervical/uterine cancer–leiomeiosarcoma–I would like to see a nonprofit foundation that truly supports research into all women’s cancers and does so while learning all the Komen Lessons.

This is another one of those instances where women should say never again.  Right now,  Planned Parenthood is my choice of causes.  Don’t contribute to any organization corrupted by the foot soldiers in the war against women.