reality

Had a meeting with Dave Toycen, the president of World Vision Canada, today. He's an impassioned speaker, and incredibly knowledgable across a really broad range of development issues. He was on the ground in Port-au-Prince within 36 hours of the Haiti earthquake, and in his career has seen first hand some of the worst things that we as humans can do to each other. But I think he would also say that he's seen some of the most amazing things that we as people are capable of – people who experienced the worst atrocities imaginable, and yet who still have hope for the future, and who are still working to help others and build something.

As someone said afterward, I can't even imagine the images in his head when he talks about this stuff.

His passion re-energizes the team, and his experience and insights help every member of the team know that they're not just doing another piece of DM or digital or whatever. Everything the team does has the possibility to move and get one more person to commit to helping others.

Having that kind of weight sitting on everything we do is a responsibility, to be sure, but it also gives us bitter, sarcastic ad weasels an unusual sense of purpose, and a welcome sense of reality.

using our powers for good, instead of evil

I know, I've used that line far too may times...

I'm working on some update communications for the Haiti disaster for World Vision tonight, and getting some perspective on what happened, and how the world and our client responded. It actually amazed and humbled me all over again – for instance, stories like the WV staffer who spent five hours getting home to his family after the quake, then turned around and was at work at 7 a.m. next morning, getting ready to deliver whatever medical supplies they could find. He literally saved people's lives.

Compared to that, we've been sitting on our asses doing nothing. But our team actually has worked tirelessly over the past two weeks and it's occurring to me that we're a part of this enormous effort – we've helped WV raise the funds to respond to this catastrophe. All the emails, radio spots, banners and DM we executed in virtually no time at all helped our client raise over $10 million. I don't say that to boast, but to congratulate a team that has done whatever was asked and much more. They knew what was at stake, they understood that there was a whole other dimension to our work.

It also adds a sense of pressure, knowing that failure has consequences. Of course failure has consequences for every client – sales mean jobs, and jobs mean mortgages payments and food – but for World Vision, the relationship between our work and the results is particularly immediate. The faces of the kids from the village near Koutiala where we shot our spots are all the incentive I need to consider all the angles, to take a second look at all the work, and wonder how we can make it better.