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This past summer’s Facebook and Twitter feeds were dominated by videos of individuals dousing themselves with buckets of ice water and challenging celebrities, friends, family, and colleagues to do the same in the name of charity. What has become known as the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge has raised over $100 million in the last month for the ALS Association. This is a 3,500% increase from the same period last year.
The challenge has sparked mass debate on social media related to whether it is really a vain exhibitionist grab for attention masked by an act of altruism or an emerging new model for fundraising that is revolutionizing how nonprofits should think about utilizing social media.
I tend to fall into the more cynical camp with my own questions related to this challenge … “Does someone really need to pour ice water over their head to do something good for charity?”
According to the ALS Association there are about 5,600 diagnoses of ALS in the United States annually, which means there are about 30,000 people living with the disease at any given time in this country. The International Alliance on ALS and MND report that there are currently about 400,000 people living with the disease globally with about 100,000 deaths a year from ALS.
Since water is a key component of the challenge, I’m pretty sure most people are using clean drinkable water to douse themselves. With that in mind, these statistics could be food for thought: UNICEF reports that 748 million people in the world rely on unsafe water and 2.5 billion people do not have access to proper sanitation. Children under the age of five are hardest hit with the second leading cause of death among of these kids being from water borne illnesses. This equates to about 1,400 children dying every day because of the lack of access to clean and safe water. So is it really responsible to be “wasting” water when so many around the world don’t have access to it or are dying because of the lack of clean water? In addition to donating to ALS, could they have saved that bucket of water and donated the equivalent to one of many water based charities like UNICEF’s Tap Project, which for every $5 donation provides one child clean water for 200 days?
Don’t get me wrong, the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge has been a boon to a very little known horrific disease and has raised important funds for research; if I were on the board of the ALS Association I would be ecstatic. However, if we were to go a little bit deeper of the 3 million plus who participated, how many of those people could even answer what the acronym ALS stands for (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis)? Or how the disease ravages the body? Will these same legions of people who readily post these videos and challenge people care next summer when the ice bucket challenge falls back into social media obscurity?
Coming from an education background and having worked with public health related issues, my question is why can’t we get 3 million plus people to care about what is happening in their neighborhood school or to read to a child or to care that sexual assault is pervasive in our institutions of higher education? Could you imagine the impact of 3 million plus people taking the same few minutes to read to a child or listen to a child read to them instead of filming and posting a video? Maybe we should challenge our friends, family, and colleagues to take the time to do something good for their community and save the ice cubes for tea.
