Originally published on October 20, 2011 and republished here in honor of breast cancer awareness month and in memory of Barbara Ehrenreich, who died on September 1, 2022. I’ve removed some defunct links and updated others. Update: the NFL ended its pink-themed breast-cancer campaign in 2018.
--
| |
|
Groundhog Day seems like an appropriate occasion to talk about “One X at a time,” the sloganclone that, like Punxsutawney Phil, keeps popping up. Year after year I point with alarm. And yet the formula thrives, in sunshine and shadow, in winter, spring, summer, and fall. I feel like such a failure.
If I had to identify the source of all this at-a-timing, I might single out “One Day at a Time,” the Norman Lear sitcom that enjoyed a robust run on network TV (1975–1984) and which last year was revived, with substantial changes – chief among them a Cuban-American family at the center of the action – for Netflix. The second season arrived last week, and a third-season renewal was announced on January 30.
| |
|
It’s hard to stay clean when you’re sleeping on the streets. A new San Francisco nonprofit, Lava Mae, has an ingenious remedy: transforming old Muni buses into mobile bathrooms, complete with stall showers and toilets, that travel to neighborhoods with the greatest need.
Lave Mae and its founder, former public-relations executive Doniece Sandoval, were featured in the San Francisco Chronicle earlier this week on the occasion of the unveiling of Bus No. 2. Sandoval’s plans include expansion throughout California.
According to the Chronicle story:
Lava Mae’s simple solution of providing homeless people with showers and toilets has captured the attention of people around the world, many of whom have asked Sandoval to help them create a similar program.
To deal with the huge interest, Sandoval is working with the International Centre for Social Franchising, which is based in London but also has an office in San Francisco. It seeks to help organizations with a social benefit replicate their work in other places around the world.
Sandoval has decided to focus on serving 30,000 homeless people around California by 2020 — and recently met with state Sen. Holly Mitchell of Los Angeles to discuss a Lava Mae-type program there.
There’s a feel-good story behind the Lava Mae name, too. Here’s how the organization’s website tells it (verbatim):
In Spanish, “lavame” means “wash me”
In our culture, we refer to vehicles in the feminine as in, “She’s a beauty, isn’t she?”
In the South, (where our founder grew up), it’s not uncommon for people to have two first names e.g Billy Bob, Peggy Sue. Putting it all together gave birth to the name Lava Mae
OK, the copy needs some, um, cleaning up. If you want to be picky about it – hey, it’s in my job description! – it’s “lávame,” with an acute accent to mark the stress on the first syllable. And I cringed a little at the bio that reads “Brett is the principle and founder of StudioTerpeluk.”
I’ll stop quibbling now and instead reaffirm that I like the Lava Mae name: it’s friendly, personal, down-home, clever, and bilingual. (The echoes of Fannie Mae and Sallie Mae, which also aim to help people in need, may be intentional.) And I applaud the work Lava Mae is doing. In a region dominated by whiz-kid techpreneurs whose idea of “making the world a better place” is selling an app that does stuff your mom used to do for you, this is a truly creative and, yes, disruptive initiative.
__
Related: Pee wall.
| |
|
I enjoy a little word puzzle as much as, or maybe more than, the next public-transit user. But two Bay Area bus-shelter signs, both for worthy nonprofit organizations, go beyond puzzling to confounding.
Here’s the first one:
SF Environment, Fillmore Avenue, San Francisco, April 26, 2015.
“Do You Really Want the City 7 x 7 x 7?” asks this poster. I stood in front of it for a couple of minutes, trying to stitch together “Do you really want the city” and “7 x 7 x 7.” What could it possibly mean?
Mull it over while I show you the other ad.
| |
|
In the spirit of Thanksgiving, here are three business names I’m grateful to know about.
*
After a disaster like Hurricane Sandy, there’s usually no shortage of clothing donations. But donors often forget about one essential item: new underwear. The nonprofit organization Underwearness raises awareness about the problem and delivers new underwear to needy children. The name is a perfect blend, and the logo is strong, playful, and vibrant.
One quibble: I wish the slogan were something more original than the “One X at a Time” snowclone, which I’ve written about several times. (Not to mention the ambiguity of “pair” here—pair of children? Pair of underwear?)
*
High-low collaborations between couture designers and mass-market retailers are old-hat by now. What’s new about Narciso Rodriguez’s recent partnership with Kohl’s is a name that’s as stylish as the clothing: DesigNation. Not only does it say “design,” “nation,” and “designation,” it visually deconstructs the logo to suggest something fresh and exciting.
*
Among the cocoa cognoscienti of San Francisco, master chocolate-maker Michael Recchiuti is famous enough that he could have named his new dessert café after himself. Instead, he called it Chocolate Lab. Yes, there’s a whiff of science about the name, nicely supported by the logo and some of the website headings – Experiments, Antidotes, Lab Time.
But it gets better. The café’s address is 801 22nd Street – in the neighborhood called Dogpatch.
Very fetching!
Chocolate Lab puppy via DogExplorer.com.
| |
|
Freshii, Embarcadero Center, San Francisco. The website claims that tomato is also your friend with benefits. Vegetables are such sluts.
Friends of the San Francisco Public Library. With benefits.
Friends with Benefits (2011), via The Works.
| |
|
“Pink” isn’t just a color, reports Natasha Singer in the New York Times; it’s a marketing strategy to raise money for breast-cancer prevention and research. And it’s a verb:
In marketing circles, “to pink” means to link a brand or a product or even the entire National Football League to one of the most successful charity campaigns of all time. Like it or not — and some people don’t like it at all — the pinking of America has become a multibillion-dollar business, a marketing, merchandising and fund-raising opportunity that is almost unrivaled in scope. There are pink-ribbon car tires, pink-ribbon clogs, pink eyelash curlers — the list goes on.
Pink Ribbon Sparkle Centerpiece. See Google Shopping for more pink-themed tchotchkes.
Call it Big Pink:
Like Big Oil, Big Food and Big Pharma, Big Pink has its share of critics. Some patient advocates complain that Komen and other pink-ribbon charities sugarcoat breast cancer, which kills about 40,000 American women and 450 men annually. Others complain that pink marketing, despite the many millions it raises for charities, is just another way to move merchandise and that it exploits cancer by turning it into an excuse to go shopping. And some pink-theme products have no relationship with any charities at all. (Consumers should check before buying.)
For a decidedly jaundiced take on pink-ribbon marketing, read Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2001 essay, “Welcome to Cancerland.”
| |
|
It’s a worthy cause, I’m sure.
But a jogging, sunglasses-wearing, pain-arrow-emanating brain for a mascot? Ouch.
Those colors! I'm seeing an aura ...
Besides, the whole concept of sponsoring a running race to raise money for headache research strikes me as inappropriate. Wouldn’t pounding through Golden Gate Park with hundreds of sweaty fellow-joggers be an automatic migraine trigger? For next year’s event, I propose an alternative to Miles for Migraine—say, Several Hours Lying Absolutely Still in a Quiet, Darkened Room (with Plenty of Strong Drugs) for Migraine.
| |
|
This week I’m looking at microstyle and the way in which small bits of copy can make a big impact. Today: making donations less boring.
The inspiration for today’s post is the new Los Angeles Review of Books, “the first major, full-service book review to launch in the 21st century, designed to exploit the latest online technologies in ways that respond to a significantly transformed publishing world.” LARB was founded in response to a serious problem:
The disappearance of the newspaper book review supplement (papers in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Des Moines, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Washington and elsewhere have shuttered or radically shrunk theirs) has been accompanied by an explosion of titles in the book market. The net result: twenty times as many titles are published each year than were in 1980, and we have one twentieth of the serious book reviews.
LARB intends to be “a largely self-supporting nonprofit institution” that pays “decent rates to our reviewers.” To that end, it’s inviting tax-deductible contributions. Nothing newsworthy here—except for the wording of the home-page prompt (“Help Us Build This Thing!”) and the names of the giving levels.
No “Silver,” “Gold,” and “Platinum” here. No, this online giving page is aimed squarely at its target audience, which cares deeply about books, literary criticism, and a vibrant marketplace of ideas. The giving levels, from plain old “Reader” up to “Founding Reader,” flatter your intelligence while challenging you to think not just about the size of your donation but also about the intensity of your commitment.
I attempted something similar when I worked with Children’s Fairyland, the oldest storybook theme park in the United States, on the language of a new adopt-an-animal campaign. Instead of leaving the donation field open-ended or simply suggesting dollar amounts, I created playful yet appropriate giving levels that suggested “helping our animals”: Companion, Best Friend, Caretaker, Keeper, and Guardian.
It’s easy to default to dollar increments when you create a donation form. But attaching meaningful, relevant names to giving categories transforms the act of contributing into something greater than writing a check or authorizing a funds transfer: it becomes an act of identification with a cause.
| |
|
I do a lot of scoffing and scolding in this space about bad names and ill-advised name changes. So it’s refreshing to have an opportunity to say something positive about a renaming effort—especially when the organization in question is small, local, and worthy.
As Montclair Community Action Group, this nonpartisan neighborhood organization had an identity problem. Montclair is an upscale, mostly white neighborhood of Oakland, a mostly poor and nonwhite city. It’s separated from the rest of the city by the Warren Freeway (Highway 13) and by hilly terrain. I live a couple miles downhill from Montclair—different schools, different library, different shopping district—and I’d never figured out a good reason to be involved with MCAG. “Montclair” in the name made the organization sound exclusive, fancy, and insular. If there was community action to be taken in Montclair, it probably had nothing to do with my life.
In June, I received an email announcement that MCAG had changed its name to Volunteering for Oakland. Suddenly, the organization made sense to me. Better still, it included me. As the website’s home page puts it:
Our grass-roots approach is to form groups that address the problems that our own volunteers identify as a priority and wish to take action on. We conduct periodic surveys of our volunteers to determine what issues are most important to them. Those topics that garner the most attention are then brought into a brainstorming session, a leadership team coalesces and a course of action is plotted out.
(I do wish someone would fix the glaring typo at the top of that page. It’s Erma Bombeck, not “Brombeck.”)
Here’s why the new name works:
This local renaming reminds me of another nonprofit name name change that occurred a decade ago, when Christmas in April—which provided free home repairs to needy homeowners—became Rebuilding Together.
“Christmas in April” had been lifted verbatim from the grateful response of a homeowner helped by the program (“It’s like Christmas in April!”). The program did, in fact, focus its efforts during the month of April. I suspect, though, that I wasn’t the only one confused and more than a little turned off by the the name. For one, I’m not Christian and I don’t celebrate Christmas. “Christmas in April” sounded like something for Christians only—something to do with carols and presents under a tree, possibly. Certainly not home repairs.
Rebuilding Together, on the other hand, is clear, upbeat, and welcoming. No religious holidays are invoked, I’m happy to say. The emphasis is on the primary activity, home repair; the name conveys action by using a verb. And “together” is as inclusive a word as “Christmas” was exclusive.
These name changes prove that it’s not enough for a nonprofit organization to have good intentions and willing volunteers. You also need a name that communicates clearly and—even more important—inspires an appropriate response.
| |
|
