Of Its Most Wasteful Spending, SFAF's Social Marketing Ads Ranks At The Top	The $1.44 Million "Assumptions" Ad Campaign
Social marketing — media advertising campaigns — are among the most efficacious, and among the most cost effective.

The worst of SFAF’s “waste” comes when it neglects to do any HIV prevention media campaigns whatsoever, since those who have not been reached with basic prevention information may end up seroconverting in the absence of a sustained advertising campaign.

This is exactly what is occurring as January 2004 begins:  SFAF is not currently running a prevention ad campaign, and hasn’t run one in over two years.  Indeed, it appears that SFAF has scrapped its HIV prevention advertising campaigns in the Bay Area precisely in order to have spare “private money,” as SFAF prefers to call it, so that it can spend well over half of its Program Services budget on Africa.  The dearth of SFAF’s social marketing has not gone unnoticed, nor has the timing of its last ad campaign, the so-called “Assumptions” campaign, which ended several months before SFAF launched its global affiliate non-profit, Pangaea.

But when it does rise to the challenge and actually conducts an ad campaign, SFAF’s wasteful spending is phenomenal, as the report below documents.  It took delivering this report to SFAF’s Board of Director’s before the Assumptions ad expenses were reigned in.

This web page will be updated in early 2004 to cover more of SFAF’s ad campaigns; but to get you started, here’s a report written in early 2000.

The $1.44 million “Assumptions” Ad Campaign  March 2000                          Top
	This report, presented as public testimony at the SFAF Board of Directors meeting on March 28, 2000, discusses the “How Do You Know What You Know” (a.k.a.,. the “Assumptions Phase I” advertising campaign that had scant appearances in the media, but was developed at great cost.  Shortly after presenting this testimony, SFAF’s Gay Life manager mysteriously vanished from SFAF’s payroll; someone’s head rolled, but it wasn’t a senior management head, it was the unfortunate low head on the totem poll.  As well, possibly as a result of this testimony, SFAF began recruiting for a new independent auditor, switching from Deloitte & Touche (to who I had sent this report and other correspondence) to PriceWaterhouseCoopers.   Learn more …

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Copyright (c) 2004 by Patrick Monette-Shaw.  All rights reserved.  This work may not be reposted anywhere on the Web, or reprinted in any print media, without express written permission of the author.  E-mail him at pmonette-shaw@earthlink.net.