The Short Answer: I hope so, but I doubt it.
By Katie Delahaye Paine
Transparency alert: I’m a breast cancer survivor, my oncologist is a medical adviser for Komen, and one of my best friends is the medical director for a Planned Parenthood office.
To say that I’m conflicted is an understatement. I am reacting to the news of Komen’s de-funding of Planned Parenthood the way most of us react to the death of a friend – with denial, disbelief, anger, and grief.
I saw the first negative tweet sometime Tuesday night and went into total denial. They must have it wrong, I thought. Why would anyone be saying such horrible things about Komen? They’re the good guys: They funded the research that may have saved my life.
Then it was on the news. Yes, in fact, they had pulled funding for breast screenings at Planned Parenthood. (Komen grants paid for about 4.3 percent of the 4 million breast exams and 9 percent of the 70,000 mammogram referrals provided at Planned Parenthood clinics in the past five years. Read more here and here.)
Disbelief came next: What are they thinking? Why would they do that? There must be some explanation. Alas, there was not. Or at least not one that didn’t scream Politics! in every sentence.
Then I felt anger: Raw, seeing-red, expletives-undeleted fury.
I was angry at them for the decision, sure. But I was angry for many more reasons. Angry for tarnishing a brand I’ve endorsed over and over again. But that was all about me. So then I got angry at them for denying services to the predominantly young, low income women that Planned Parenthood serves. I got angrier when my friend emailed me that her Planned Parenthood office had recently detected suspicious lumps in five women who, as it turned out, had breast cancer. Cancer that would have gone undetected were it not for that Planned Parenthood visit.
Then I got even angrier because I emailed, commented, and tweeted to Komen -- and no one was listening. I know the PR people at Komen, and know them to be smart and good at their jobs. They even measure their results based on outcomes, for god sakes!
I can only imagine the hell on earth that their offices must be right now. A hell that they certainly didn’t cause, and that they certainly can’t fix. A hell made worse by people far above their pay grade making stupid decisions and dealing with this crisis by behaving like ostriches. Attempting to control the criticism by cutting off the dialog. Putting out stilted videos that do nothing to address the concerns of their critics, and everything to belittle them. As if that is going to make critics feel better and/or go away.
Then I started reading everyone else’s comments on the various blogs and Facebook pages and I got even angrier at the idealogues on both sides that have turned a fundamental issue of women’s health into a platform for their diatribes.
Finally I got sad, and mourned my loss. I had lost a source of hope. When I was facing a choice of treatments for Stage 2 invasive ductal carcinoma, my doctor assured me that if I chose chemotherapy and radiation it would keep cancer at bay for at least five years and “by that time we will have found a cure.” And the one organization that I truly believed might fund that cure was Komen. I believed that because my oncologist was advising Komen and if anything was going to beat cancer it was a team that included Dana Farber and Komen.
It’s been 8 years and they haven’t found a cure, but they’ve made a lot of progress. But now, thousands of loyal Komen donors are pledging to give elsewhere, or directly to Planned Parenthood. As much as I may not share their beliefs, I now have to hope that the pro-life contingent makes up the difference. Which is, of course, what Komen is also hoping.
I am also mourning the loss that one feels when a trust is broken. Every brand is at its core a promise. Southwest Airlines promises me the freedom to fly. FedEx promises me that my packages wlll get there overnight. Komen promised me that they would find a cure.
In reality, we all know that brands can fail. Southwest can be more expensive. FedEx can lose my package. And Komen really isn’t the perfect, research-above-all organization that I thought it was. Like many major non-profits it spends at least as much time on courting donors -- sometimes unsavory ones -- than it does on finding a cure.
I have lost something else too. I had planned on participating in the first ever Komen for a Cure race in Portsmouth, NH. It was a big deal that Komen was coming to Portsmouth -- the kind of thing that puts a little town on the map -- and I had recruited a number of friends to be part of my team.
There is no longer a team. Even if I wanted to participate, my friends have refused, and I can’t blame them.
To my friends at Planned Parenthood: Congratulations! You’ve gotten your message out, you’ve made the money back and more. (And thank you, Mayor Bloomberg, for your help.) To my friends at Komen: Write a book -- and if you want to jump ship, we’re hiring.
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Katie Delahaye Paine is CEO of KDPaine & Partners, a company that delivers custom research to measure brand image, public relationships, and engagement. Katie Paine is a dynamic and experienced speaker on public relations and social media measurement. Click here for the schedule of Katie’s upcoming speaking engagements. Katie and Beth Kanter are authors of the book “Measuring the Networked Nonprofit,” to be published this year by Wiley.
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