It is not very often that I disagree with Wil Wheaton, quite honestly. I just read his Tumblr repost of the Daily What Article regarding the recent “Kony 2012” video that began circulating with the intent of raising awareness of this not so cool guy in Africa and keep pressure on the US Government to continue to provide support for the forces seeking his arrest.Invisible Children’s Response is also interesting.
For full disclosure, I am not connected to any party involved in this. I watched the video yesterday, was moved, and forwarded it on. I saw the backlash start today, and decided that I wanted to speak to it.
First, before we continue, please make sure you have read these things:
Joseph Kony’s Wikipedia Listing
The Guidestar listing for Invisible Children, Inc.
Invisible Children’s Wikipedia Listing
BBC News Profile of Joseph Kony
Here’s a nice BBC piece from 2009 as well
So, to set the table appropriately, Kony is universally agreed to be a bad guy- so the issue at stake is not whether or not Kony deserves to be captured- and that’s an important point- no one is defending a man that deserves no defense.
The issue arises with Invisible Children, Inc. and- to keep it simple- if the people behind the organization are using charity money for things other than the charity.
Fair question, every charity should be challenged for honesty’s sake.
So, for starters, Wil points out that Charity Navigator gives them a 2 star rating. When I pull up the page, I see a three star rating (he selectively chose the rating for transparency and ignored the 4 star financial rating), but I’ll go with the flow here.
1. Argument One: “they won’t let their financials be independently audited.”
So, the issue here is that they have not allowed 3rd party auditing. According to Charity navigator, the rating is:” 
The charity’s audited financials were prepared by an independent accountant, but it did not have an audit oversight committee. ” Hmmm. Ok, let’s move on.
As for the Better Business Bureau reference, I think this sums it up: ” While participation in the Alliance’s charity review efforts is voluntary, the Alliance believes that failure to participate may demonstrate a lack of commitment to transparency. ” So, basically, if you don’t play by our rules, you are bad, period. Can’t have it both ways here, one organization that judges based on participation in their own program?
Regarding the Foreign Affairs Reference, let’s pull the entire sentence, and not just the conveniently damming snippet: “In their campaigns, such organizations have manipulated facts for strategic purposes, exaggerating the scale of LRA abductions and murders and emphasizing the LRA’s use of innocent children as soldiers, and portraying Kony — a brutal man, to be sure — as uniquely awful, a Kurtz-like embodiment of evil.” READ THAT ENTIRE ARTICLE, IT WILL MAKE YOU SMARTER.
Hmm, where have I seen someone exaggerate and emphasize particular attributes or facts for the purpose of getting a point across? I’ll let you think about that one.
2. “By IC’s own admission, only 31% of all the funds they receive go toward actually helping anyone [pdf]. The rest go to line the pockets of the three people in charge of the organization, to pay for their travel expenses (over $1 million in the last year alone) and to fund their filmmaking business (also over a million) — which is quite an effective way to make more money, as clearly illustrated by the fact that so many can’t seem to stop forwarding their well-engineered emotional blackmail to everyone they’ve ever known.”
From Charity Navigator:
Now, I don’t know how often Wil has traveled to Africa, but going to Uganda isn’t exactly on the Southwest Airlines $49 fee sale list. Traveling to some parts of the world requires, how shall we say it, certain investments to mitigate risk (or here). The entire world is not a shiny southern California suburb where protest signs are made at Kinkos. Imagine traveling there with film equipment, or having someone find out you are filming there because you want to meddle in someone’s business. Let’s say that someone is a killer, that perhaps has informants all over the landscape. I remember some guy in Afghanistan finding a way to strike out against an entire country and killing over 2,000 people in one day- so yeah, if they spend some money to make sure that they don’t disappear in the night, I think there’s justification for that.
But Ok, let’s JUST focus on Kony here, and we’ll see where this takes us… scroll back up to the Metrics, now scroll back down.
The point of the Kony 2012 Campaign, as stated plainly in the video, is to create awareness of Kony and his atrocities and keep pressure on the US Government to continue to support his capture.
IT’S CALLED LOBBYING. This is actually the part that raised my eyebrow… They want to raise money to promote awareness and create pressure to continue to hunt down a bad guy. I’m not exactly sure, in today’s world of SuperPACs, Corporate governance and “for sale” legislators, how anyone could possibly not see this as creative way to use the system against itself.
It really comes down to:
What Wil says at the end, do your work and read up on what you want to support. But don’t crucify an organization because they are successful at what they set out to do, just because you are tired of having people send you the video.
