IN THE TRENCHES
By Jennifer C. Berkshire
When People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals sought to develop a youth division four years ago, organizers
of the animal-rights group in Norfolk, Va., knew they wanted music to be a key component of their efforts to reach young people.
“Our goal was to focus on things that kids care about,” says Caleb Wheeldon, senior outreach coordinator at PETA2, the charity’s youth-oriented counterpart. “Our audience is heavily into music, so we needed to be right there with them.”
To reach that audience, PETA2 has literally taken its show on the road.
Every summer, the charity sends eight staff members and a host of volunteers out on the road to concerts and festivals where young music lovers — and potential animal-rights advocates — congregate.
This summer, the group is staffing tables at shows by the alternative-rock groups The Strokes, The Donnas, and Nine Inch Nails, along with appearances by the vintage rocker Joan Jett. At each show, says Mr. Wheeldon, the goal is the same: to educate and inform young music lovers about animal rights.
“On any particular day, we can talk to thousands and thousands of young people,” he says.
Those conversations most often occur across that staple of 21st-century pop-music concerts: the nonprofit table.
Concertgoers who are lured to the PETA2 table are offered free stickers, prizes, and other giveaways in exchange for handing over their contact information and listening to a few moments of the group’s pro-vegetarian, anti-animal-abuse pitch, including footage from a new documentary about fur farming in China narrated by Nine Inch Nails’ leader, Trent Reznor.
The end result: Four summers of “tabling” at concerts have produced an e-mail list of more than 400,000 young supporters to whom PETA2 regularly sends news and information about the group’s activities.
“For a nonprofit trying to get their message out, outreach at shows is a wonderful tool,” says Mr. Wheeldon.
Making a Musical Match
Successful collaborations between artists and activists requires at least some shared commitment to a common cause.
PETA2 reaches out to artists who are known to be vegetarians or animal lovers and is constantly on the hunt for new bands and musicians who fit that bill.
“A lot of musicians approach us, but we also spend quite a bit of time researching bands, finding out who is sympathetic,” says Mr. Wheeldon.
Angie Hougas, who runs Rhythm n’ Rights, a project of Amnesty International USA that spreads the charity’s message at concerts, has made something of an art form of identifying performers who are passionate about the issue of human rights.
“You have to keep your eyes and your ears open,” says Ms. Hougas, a member of Amnesty International’s national board who lives in Madison, Wis. “I watch VH1 to try to find out the interests of the bands, and I have a lot of music that I may only have listened to once or twice,” she says. “If I’m going to ask a performer a favor — and that’s what it is — I need to be able to say something about the music.”
It’s an approach that has paid off well for Ms. Hougas and for Amnesty International, which now regularly joins the tours of well-known artists, including R.E.M., the Dave Matthews Band, and David Bowie — setting up tables at each stop to call attention to human-rights abuses. And while the high-profile charity regularly hears from performers who want to help out, it’s often Ms. Hougas herself who approaches them about getting involved.
“The first band I went after was Matchbox Twenty. This was before they broke out, before there were Rob Thomas haircuts,” recalls Ms. Hougas, referring to the band’s stylishly shaggy lead singer. “I asked and they said yes, and we ended up tabling through their whole Western tour.”
These days, when Amnesty International joins forces with an artist, Ms. Hougas will request spots on the entire national — even international — tour. At each stop, the charity recruits volunteers from its database to staff its tables.
The human-rights cases highlighted by volunteers at each of the shows are picked to match the interests of the bands.
“I try to find out what the band’s passion is,” she says. “Then, when the tour’s over, I always get back to the [artist’s] manager and let them know what’s happened with the cases. This shows them how much they’re contributing.”
Artists With Issues
Marc Ross, founder and director of Rock the Earth, a three-year-old charity that works with the music industry on environmental causes, picks its pet projects based on what the musicians themselves care about.
“There’s a long tradition of social activism among musicians, and if you have the time to cultivate a relationship, you’ll find that everyone has an issue. They grew up next to a factory farm, or they have an uncle who likes to fish whose favorite stream is dead,” says Mr. Ross. “Our idea is to give artists an outlet to advance an issue that they’re passionate about.”
Mr. Ross notes, however, that such passion is only one part of what his group considers when deciding whether to take up a cause.
Other factors include the timeliness of an issue — Rock the Earth generally avoids cases that are already the subject of lawsuits or governmental investigation — along with its potential appeal to music fans as well as other artists, and the likelihood of success.
One cause that did pass the charity’s muster: a campaign to save wetlands endangered by the King William Reservoir Project near Newport News, Va., that was prompted by the musician Scott Miller, best known for anchoring the house band, Scott Miller and the Commonwealth, on the hit television comedy sketch show Blue Collar TV.
“He’s the one who told us about the issue,” recalls Mr. Ross. “It turns out that he grew up near there and he feels passionate about it. As a result of that we started reaching out to other environmental groups in Virginia.”
Rock the Earth is currently in the midst of its biggest summer so far.
Mr. Ross will be on the road for two-thirds of the season, joined by six interns; his tour started in June at the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival in Manchester, Tenn., which attracted 80,000 people.
In addition to making contact with concertgoers and soliciting donations, Mr. Ross is also hoping to get a few more leads about environmental issues of concern to the musicians with whom he will be spending the summer.
“Sometimes it’s just a question of asking them, ‘What issues do you care about?’” he notes.
Other times, it’s more serendipitous, he says, recalling a Barenaked Ladies concert at the Red Rocks Amphitheater in Denver in 2004, when the charity was approached by Susan Trucks, mother of Derek Trucks, guitarist with the Allman Brothers Band.
“She expressed concern about the loss of wetlands near Jacksonville, Fla.,” Mr. Ross recalls.
Since then, the charity has been working with artists to stop the construction of the Freedom Commerce Centre, a proposed development on more than 600 acres in northeast Florida, near where the Trucks family lives. So far, the protesters have been able to persuade government officials to reject the original plan and approve one that would fill in 35 acres of wetlands as opposed to the original 167 acres.
Keeping It Local
While joining nationwide concert tours may sound like fun, charities often find that establishing a presence at a single show by a like-minded artist can also reap benefits, raising money as well as awareness about their mission.
The Door, a child-advocacy group in New York, has approached many popular artists over the years, says Katherine Guenther, the charity’s director of development. “We’ve come close a couple of times, but if it’s not their thing it’s almost not worth the effort,” she says.
But two years ago, The Door was contacted by Dar Williams, a folk singer who offered to put on a concert for the charity.
“She had a connection to someone on our board,” recalls Ms. Guenther. “That’s how she found out about us.”
The concert raised a few thousand dollars and marked the start of a relationship between Ms. Williams and The Door. Last year, the singer performed on behalf of the charity once more, this time calling Ms. Guenther up on stage and encouraging members of the audience to make donations.
“I felt like she was endorsing our mission,” says Ms. Guenther. And while she notes that the concert didn’t raise huge sums — she recalls that it brought in a few thousand dollars — “it just felt really good,” she says.
The Door won’t be following Ms. Williams on the road, however. The singer makes a point of picking a local charity for which to raise money at most of her concerts.
How does she determine which nonprofit organizations to approach? “I ask my promoters and people I know. I also look on the Web,” says Ms. Williams, who is partial to small charities engaged in work on housing and homelessness issues, along with environmental causes, including organic farming.
“When in doubt, I just Google ‘community garden’ in the specific town. I’m assured that I’ll find projects that are very tangible and rooted in dirt. It usually leads to other really cool things: groups that work with underserviced urban areas with no access to fresh food, for example.”
Lost In the Crowd
Forging a meaningful relationship with an artist is an ideal way for a charity to increase its presence at a concert. But nonprofit organizations often learn the hard way that simply setting up a table is no guarantee of success.
Catherine D’Amato, president of the Greater Boston Food Bank, says that her group is regularly invited to set up tables and collect canned goods at concerts. That doesn’t mean, however, that the charity jumps at all such opportunities.
“We’ve participated in events where we showed up and the promotion people hadn’t told the band we were coming. Or an event was billed as a canned-food drive, but generated very little food because either no one knew about it or there wasn’t an incentive for people to bring cans,” says Ms. D’Amato. “These are lessons we’ve learned over a long period of time. It can be hard for a nonprofit to say no, but we’re now much more selective about the kind of events we participate in.”
These days, the Greater Boston Food Bank limits its concert-outreach efforts to a few big venues, featuring major stars — Bruce Springsteen is one of the charity’s favorites — who have a demonstrated commitment to ending hunger. And the charity makes a point of ensuring that the event will get the promotion necessary to generate plenty of canned goods.
“If we’re going to have to provide staff and volunteers, we might ask for a letter of intent asking them to spell out the amount of promotion,” says Ms. D’Amato.
Hitting the Road
When Oxfam America teamed up with the British rock band Coldplay on its 2003 U.S. concert tour, the charity, which campaigns to end global poverty, thought it had an ideal way to build support for its effort to end farm subsidies in the world’s wealthiest countries.
Volunteers for the organization, which has its headquarters in Boston, placed postcards on every single seat in the Hollywood Bowl. The cards, addressed to the U.S. trade representative, called for an overhaul of the farm-subsidy system.
“We were brand new to this. We’d never done it before and we were starting really big,” recalls Brian Rawson, senior organizer at Oxfam’s Make Trade Fair campaign. “We thought we’d be raking in the postcards, but people didn’t even notice them. It takes a lot of handholding and prompting to get someone to fill out a postcard.”
Oxfam didn’t give up, though. By the time Coldplay returned to America last year, the charity had completely revamped its approach to getting attention at concerts.
Change number one: replacing postcards with petitions, making it easier for volunteers to collect signatures. Oxfam also stepped up its training of volunteers, circulating talking points in advance so that everyone representing the group at a Coldplay show could articulate four or five points about global trade inequities.
Perhaps most important, the charity all but abandoned the idea of traditional “tabling” at the concerts, relying instead on squads of 10 to 20 volunteers, armed with pens and clipboards, to approach and talk to members of the audience. The handful of tables set up by Oxfam at each concert were instead used as a home base for canvassers, or a place where interested concertgoers could stop by for additional information.
“Tabling is the most common thing for groups to do at concerts,” says Mr. Rawson. “But it’s passive outreach. People have to come to you. In this case, because of our relationship with the band, we were able to spread out.”
By the conclusion of Coldplay’s 2005-6 tour, Oxfam had collected 90,000 signatures at 61 performances, individuals that the charity now contacts with trade-related news updates as well as information about volunteer opportunities. While the charity’s efforts brought in a bumper crop of potential supporters, Oxfam also discovered what many musicians well know: touring can be exhausting.
“Going on a tour like this requires a revolving deadline and a different group of volunteers every night,” cautions Mr. Rawson. “To any organization considering this, I’d say that it’s fun and exciting, but it’s a lot of work.”
Does your charity work with touring musical acts to spread its message, and has it helped raise your group’s public profile? Describe your experience in the Share Your Brainstorms online forum.