Reaching for the Stars

Little-known charity tries to get the most from movie appearance

When the curtain rises at the Academy Awards ceremony later this month, staff members at Childreach,

an international aid organization in Warwick, R.I., will be glued to their television sets, rooting for Jack Nicholson and Kathy Bates to win acting honors for their performances in About Schmidt. Childreach plays a supporting role in the film, and an Oscar victory could provide extra visibility for the little-known charity.

The movie follows the relationship between Schmidt, a retired insurance executive in Omaha, Neb. (played by Mr. Nicholson), and Ndugu, a 7-year old boy in Tanzania whom he “sponsors” by sending a donation to Childreach. Schmidt writes Ndugu several long letters that unfold more honestly than conversations the character has with his wife or daughter. At the end of the movie, a letter and a drawing from the child provoke a tearful reaction from a previously emotionally closed man.

In the film, Childreach’s name appears once, in a scene in which Schmidt opens a direct-mail package that is identical to those the charity sends its donors. The photograph used in the movie of Ndugu is also of a recipient of Childreach aid, although his real name is Abdala. And the charity’s phone number flashes on the screen, in a television commercial Schmidt watches about child sponsorship.

Being included in the movie “is manna from heaven,” says Amy M. Luz, chief marketing officer at Childreach. “Imagine that you get your story, your reason for being, out there in a 120-minute film. It boggles the mind to think that it’s actually real.”

Nevertheless, Childreach officials knew that their lucky break was not going to translate into increased financial success and name recognition unless they spent a lot of money and put in a lot of hard work.

So far, the charity’s promotion efforts have helped increase the number of people signing up to make donations to sponsor children from three or four on a weekend to about 50, but the jump has not been as big as officials had initially expected. Childreach executives say additional gains in donations may be possible thanks to marketing plans still in the works, including a five-minute advertisement that will appear on the videocassette and DVD versions of the movie. They also hope the movie’s distributor, New Line Cinema, will include them in any About Schmidt Oscar publicity.

Even if a landslide of donations doesn’t materialize, Childreach officials say the film has helped provide longterm legitimacy for its work, and valuable exposure to the idea of child sponsorship for millions of viewers who might become donors to Childreach or a similiar organization.

A Producer Calls

The unlikely partnership between the Hollywood movie and the international aid charity started two years ago, when Childreach got a call from Bill Badalato, one of About Schmidt‘s producers. According to Ms. Luz, Mr. Badalato told the charity he was looking for a nonsectarian group with a long track record to include in the film, one that could provide him with photos and other materials on real children who had been helped through child-sponsorship arrangements. Through talks with Childreach officials, Mr. Badalato learned that Childreach fit the bill: It was started in 1937 under the name Foster Parents Plan, and now helps poor people in 43 developing countries. The group changed its name to Childreach 12 years ago.

Intrigued by the idea, Childreach officials agreed to review the script and later flew to Omaha at the charity’s expense to meet with Mr. Badalato and the movie’s director, Alexander Payne, over a series of long dinners to discuss how the movie planned to use the charity.

The two parties ended up coming to a deal and signing a contract. The charity agreed to provide materials to the producers, including previous commercials that showed its work in several countries, including Tanzania, the Dominican Republic, and Honduras to be used for a commercial in the film; photographs of several children so the producers could pick one of them to be the character Ndugu; and a child’s drawing to be used at the film’s close. The producers also wanted prior approval of how the charity planned to use the movie in its fund-raising and publicity materials and on its Web site. While the contract’s exact terms are confidential, the producers agreed in the contract to make a good-faith effort to treat child sponsorship with dignity and respect in the script. However, if Childreach objected to a scene, the charity had no power to change it.

“It was a leap of faith that they were not going to embarrass us,” says Samuel A. Worthington, Childreach’s executive director.

No money changed hands as part of the contract. But crew members from the film later donated $5,500 to create an endowed sponsorship for Abdala, which will support projects in his village, a nine-hour drive from Dar es Salaam, in Tanzania, in perpetuity.

Deciding to Loosen Up

Mr. Worthington says the charity decided to lend its name to the project because it felt the overall message of the film’s child-sponsorship theme was positive, even if the content in some of Schmidt’s letters to Ndugu were played for laughs. For example, Mr. Worthington says he and others at the charity were initially uncomfortable with scenes in which Schmidt encloses checks with his letters to Ndugu, including one case in which he adds a little extra and tells the boy to cash the check and run down to the store and get something to eat. Not only is there no bank and no store in the child’s remote village, but Childreach’s donors send checks to the organization, not to the child they sponsor. The money is then used to improve the village where the child lives. In Abdala’s case, for instance, money does not go to him but is used to build schools and medical clinics, dig wells and latrines, and provide immunizations and mosquito nets to stem the spread of malaria.

Mr. Worthington and others at the charity decided that viewers would realize Schmidt was being naive, and that to do business with Hollywood, Childreach had to loosen up a bit and let go of some of the details of its work.

“It’s not a documentary,” says Ms. Luz. “If we wrote the script nobody would go see the film. It’s a comedy and we want people to see it and when they see it, it is a starting point for them to understand and to become involved.”

Another piece of the film Childreach officials would have changed if they had had the choice is the commercial Schmidt sees late one night. Mr. Payne decided to splice together the most heart-wrenching footage that Childreach supplied, pictures of poor, crying children suffering from hunger and disease. But the charity recently decided to avoid appeals that compel donors to give out of guilt.

“We try in our ads to focus more on the dignity of children and are trying to move away from the image of child sponsorship as acting through pity,” says Mr. Worthington. “Rather we want people to act through a sense of, ‘Here are some people who want to make a difference in their lives, let’s join them in their effort.’”

Changing Its Appeals

In fact, Childreach’s appearance in About Schmidt prompted officials to speed up a transition already in the works: a redesign of the organization’s appeals that shows how the charity is helping poor children and their neighborhoods, instead of focusing on the suffering of children. In January, the charity changed its television and mail appeals, and is waiting to see if the new message connects with donors. Childreach, which is the U.S. affiliate of Plan, a global international-aid organization, was scheduled this year to change its name for the third time, to Plan. But the movie producers preferred calling the charity Childreach, so a name change won’t take place until at least 2004, after the movie buzz dissipates.

Donations to the charity have risen lately, which officials attribute at least in part to the publicity related to About Schmidt. The organization raises most of its money from donors who pay $24 a month to sponsor a child in another country. Donors exchange letters and sometimes pictures with a specific child the charity hopes will symbolize why developing countries need aid.

In January, one of the charity’s direct-mail appeals landed in 1.3 million homes of people who had not previously given. Half the mail pieces included an insert about the charity’s involvement in the movie and half did not. The mail with the insert is producing twice as many donations as those without it. However, the percentages are still small: 0.04 percent of those who received the insert made a gift, compared with 0.02 percent, says Ms. Luz. In the next mailing, in March, all 1 million pieces will probably include the insert.

Donations to the Web site have also increased. In January 2002, 180 people signed up to be donors through the Internet. This January, 490 people signed up.

The charity has also used its Web site to trumpet its role in the movie. The front page of the site features a photo of Jack Nicholson as Warren Schmidt and one of Abdala, as well as the child’s drawing used at the end of the film. Visitors can read the story of how the charity got involved with the film and press clippings about the charity’s role in the film, and view footage of Abdala in his village.

While donations have increased, the charity thought the jump would be higher and more immediate following the movie’s release. Mr. Worthington says that even after the movie fades from public consciousness, he thinks the legitimacy conferred on the group by being in the film, and the press coverage it has brought, will help secure gifts from major donors and foundations for years to come.

Marketing Plan

One concern Childreach officials had about the movie was that audiences might assume the charity, like Schmidt, was fictional. While the charity has 70,000 child sponsors and a $43-million budget, “we are an unknown organization,” says Ms. Luz. “Had it been Save the Children, people would have remembered that it was Save the Children.”

Working with publicists at New Line Cinema, the movie’s distributor, and with Captains of Industry, a marketing firm in Boston, Ms. Luz pulled out all the stops to capitalize on the charity’s 15 minutes of fame and let viewers know Childreach exists. The charity spent nearly $500,000 on several marketing tools, including a 60-second advertisement for Childreach that ran in movie theaters in more than 50 cities before the film started and two short videos available to America Online subscribers, one that featured Abdala and his village, and the other that had short interviews with Childreach’s child sponsors. Officials from Captains of Industry designed a print advertisement for the charity, which is based on the movie’s poster, and submitted it to major magazines for use as a public-service announcement.

The charity is also trying to attract new sponsors by making phone calls to 10,000 of its donors, urging them to take friends to see the movie and then use it to begin a conversation about the charity’s work. A rotating group of staff members makes calls over pizza on Monday and Thursday nights. Most donors are willing to spread the word, says Kitty Holt, who oversees research and development for the charity. Only one or two complained that the movie did not accurately portray child sponsorship, she says.

Some Setbacks

Ms. Luz was not able to accomplish everything she had hoped in tying the movie to the charity. Plans for Kathy Bates to do the voiceover for the on-screen advertisement fell through, as did a movie-premiere event for donors in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut that Ms. Luz hoped would raise money for the group. Ms. Luz also wished to have movie theaters distribute mini-CD-ROMs containing information about Childreach, but found that theater owners do not want to pass items out to patrons.

Some of the charity’s initial promotion efforts were hampered by timing. The movie was released in mid-December, but Ms. Luz says publicists for About Schmidt asked the charity to wait several weeks before doing its own promotions. Ms. Luz says she believes the studio asked for the delay because it wanted to promote the movie as a dark comedy and worried that too much emphasis on the charity would confuse that theme. (A spokesman for the movie referred all questions about New Line’s agreement with the charity to the movie’s producer, who did not return repeated calls asking for comment.)

“New Line has been cooperative, but on their time schedule, which you can certainly understand — they are in it for the business,” says Ms. Luz, who met with New Line officials several times in Los Angeles, trips she made in one day to lessen the charity’s expense. “Now is when the rubber meets the road in terms of some of the promises they have made about doing things together.”

While the charity’s marketing efforts already seem to be having some impact, some charity experts say Childreach could have been more strategic in its plans. R. Christine Hershey, president of Cause Communications, a group in Santa Monica, Calif., that does marketing for nonprofit organizations, questions whether the charity should have focused so much of its money on the on-screen advertisement. Ms. Hershey is skeptical about whether such ads prompt people to give.

In addition, she says the charity should have spent money on marketing deals with Internet search engines. Instead, it is Children International, not Childreach, that has a prominent link on Google that appears when users do a search on the words “About Schmidt,” which urges them to “make a difference” by sponsoring a child.

Ms. Luz of Childreach says all the work tied to the Hollywood venture to increase the group’s name recognition has been a bit frustrating at times. “We feel like we turned over every rock possible and to a certain extent we are still having to depend on a little bit of serendipity,” she says.

But even with no big spike in donations yet, Ms. Luz says she would jump at the chance to undertake a movie project again, even if it meant arriving at the office at 4:30 a.m. as she often has over the past year to work on the marketing campaign.

“No matter what happens,” says Ms. Luz, “people have been reading about children in the developing world. That is something before the film we probably would not have achieved.”