Basic Premise

How Do You Get Goliath to Listen to David?

As many as 300,000 people have died in Darfur since 2003, according to the UN.
Photo of Darfur refugee, with permission of Mia Farrow

Strategic Consulting

Our basic • premise for this campaign:
The highest-level moral consensus — for instance, such conventions as the International Declaration of Human Rights — can be powerful advocacy campaign tools.

PR Challenge:
Our assignment is to engage the corporate sponsors of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games in a human rights mission: ending genocide in Darfur. The client, Dream for Darfur, an advocacy campaign headed by actor-activist Mia Farrow, demands change in China’s policy vis-à-vis the genocide in Darfur, Sudan.

Our Strategy:
Our corporate social responsibility strategy for the Olympic sponsors is based on the world’s simplest test of hypocrisy: comparing what someone says to what they do.

We document each of 19 top Olympic Sponsors’ “corporate responsibility” statements.
Our campaign is transparent.
We engage senior management.

Our Success Story:

Our mission was to heighten public awareness of a human rights crisis. Our “Report Cards” graded Olympic Corporate Sponsors and the International Olympic Committee on their failure to pressure China, the 2008 Olympic host, to help stop then-ongoing genocide in Darfur.

Our Corporate Sponsors’ Report Card series becomes one of Olympic Dream for Darfur’s most successful media tools. We produce three 100-page Report Cards underscoring disparities between the Olympic Sponsors’ corporate social responsibility statements, and their action (or lack thereof) on the Darfur crisis. With titles such as “And Now, Not a Word from Our Sponsors: A Report Card Grading Corporate Sponsors of the 2008 Olympics on Their Response to the Genocide in Darfur,” and “Big Chill: Too Scared to Speak, Olympic Sponsors Still Silent on Darfur,” these Report Cards generate enormous media coverage.

Ellen is an independent and self-motivated project leader and writer, demonstrating unusually high levels of creativity and clarity in her writing. She is a big impact contributor, drawing on her very high level of skill at organizing information, tactics, and strategies. She is a quick learner and integrates her work and contributions into a complex environment well. She has very effective interpersonal skills for 1-1 interactions, not only within the team and the extended team, but also as a representative of the team to senior executives outside the team. ~Eric Cohen, Chairperson, Investors Against Genocide.