In the photograph, Londy is a sweet 6-year-old girl in a lacy dress, an oversize sweater and tiny boots.
The background suggests poverty, but her face summons hope.
“This child needs YOU,” the accompanying letter implores. “Your $12 can truly work miracles.”
The face of Londy Rodriguez Gomez continues to help bring in thousands of child sponsorships for Children International, a Kansas City-based organization.
But the photograph and accompanying fundraising appeal, which describes a 6-year-old child who weighs 44 pounds, stands 3-foot-10 and lives in a one-room shack with a tin roof, symbolize the myths of child sponsorship.
In reality, Londy Gomez is a teenager who likes fast food and rock ‘n’ roll music. She lives in a neatly kept masonry house with several rooms. Her father holds a full-time job and her mother runs a food stand out of their home, which has a television, a stereo, a microwave and a threadbare but matching sofa and chair. Though still quite poor, the family continues to strive for economic betterment.
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Half a lifetime lies between the demure young lady Londy has become and the snapshot of the needy girl Children International took eight years ago and continued to use as recently as late last year. But in the child sponsorship industry, where powerful advertising images can supersede the facts of life, gaps between rhetoric and reality are common.
Operating from a spacious headquarters on the rolling prairie just outside Kansas City, Mo., Children International has crafted a sophisticated marketing program to establish an entrenched position in the child sponsorship industry.
CI promises its donors that it can do what other sponsorship agencies do, but for only $12 a month, about half the price of the competition. Instead of emphasizing large-scale community development, the organization says it can work a miracle in a needy child’s life by delivering a buffet of goods and services.
At the heart of that appeal, which has taken Children International from an obscure religious charity to a $65 million-a-year marketing machine in the space of two decades, is the face of a tiny child.
“When you look at a child’s eyes,” says Jerry Huntsinger, a direct-mail fundraiser and former architect of Children International’s appeals, “you are seeing your inner self. Everything was built around their eyes. Girls work better than boys. Young children work better than older ones. Never have a teenager.”
A Children International photographer first took Londy’s picture in 1989, according to her mother, Rosa Gomez, after Londy had been a sponsored child for about two years. The charity has used the picture since.
Gomez said she had no idea her daughter’s picture was being used to attract prospective sponsors, although she offered no strong objection. When Londy saw her kindergarten-era image, she suppressed an embarrassed giggle.
Officials for Children International declined to answer questions about the representations the organization has made about Londy. In fact, with limited exceptions, the organization’s top officials largely declined to answer questions posed by the baiduhai about its operations or the way it uses the millions of dollars it raises from the public each year.
But a review of internal documents and financial filings and interviews with more than a dozen former employees offers a fuller portrait of the charity.
Nearly 30 years ago, Children International was a down-on-its-luck charity led by Rev. Ralph Baney, a flamboyant fundraiser who spent sponsor dollars on Tennessee walking horses, an 85-foot luxury yacht and an opulent “worldwide headquarters” with a ceiling-to-floor indoor waterfall.
Today, Children International is one of the nation’s fastest-growing child sponsorship organizations, operating on four continents. It positions itself as the low-cost provider of child sponsorship, using evocative ads and pictures of children to attract donors with two of the most time-honored pitches in advertising: low price and a no-money-down offer.
The trappings of its success are evident in Children International’s headquarters, a French Colonial-style building with sweeping grounds that look more like a country club than a charity. Its most recent balance sheet shows an endowment fund of $16 million, money the charity has invested in a variety of stocks, bonds and government securities.
But the hallmark of Children International’s success is its marketing–a combination of fundraising techniques and television ads that dramatically portray how charities sell the idea of child sponsorship to millions of Americans.
Although much of Children International’s success occurred in recent years, the story of its transformation began in 1970 when the organization hired an accountant named Joseph Gripkey.
When Gripkey was made director of CI–then called the Holy Land Christian Mission–in 1973, the charity had lost its tax-exempt status because of Baney’s use of contributions for his personal enrichment. That meant donors could not deduct their contributions to the charity on their tax returns.
Gripkey righted a listing ship. He posted a guard outside Baney’s residence and eventually forced Baney to resign, Gripkey said later in a newspaper report.
He promised the board and the IRS that he could correct the wrongs caused by Baney’s chicanery. In 1974, the tax exemption was restored and Gripkey formally took over.
“I feel like I was chosen for the job, if you will, like it was my destiny,” he said in a phone interview with the Tribune.
Two decades ago, the mission’s sole operation was a Bethlehem relief effort for widows and children. Its benefactors had been Americans who came of age during the Marshall Plan and remained faithful to the ideal of sending “love baskets” to widows and medical supplies to crippled Arab children in the Middle East.
Gripkey decided he had to expand the mission or the charity might slowly die.
He turned to Jerry Huntsinger, an advertising impresario, well-known in the child sponsorship industry from his previous work for Christian Children’s Fund and the Foster Parent’s Plan, the forerunner of Childreach.
For 15 years, until their relations soured, the two men fashioned CI’s highly successful marketing strategy. To this day Gripkey refers to Huntsinger as a “genius.”
Huntsinger told Gripkey that his expansion into international child sponsorship would put him up against the charity establishment–CCF, WorldVision and Save the Children.
The one clear way to stand out, Huntsinger advised Gripkey, was to offer sponsorship at the lowest price. Tap the less well-heeled masses. It was an approach that had worked for mass-marketed products, Huntsinger said, and it could work for child sponsorship too.
“It was a little like a manufacturing group where the product was out of date and they needed to retool and come up with a new product,” he said. “My concept was that there was a market for sponsorship to go after, the lower end of the market.
“I was right. It worked like gangbusters.”
A former Methodist minister who left that calling to follow a love of writing, Huntsinger became the creative force behind Children International’s phenomenal rise. He told Gripkey the way to compete against established charities was to take a contrarian point of view.
They decided to undercut the competition on price, initially offering sponsorship for $10 a month.
“Life is price sensitive,” Huntsinger said.
Other sponsorship organizations were charging $20 a month or more at the time, and Huntsinger said he wanted potential donors to think: “I can’t afford the $22 a month. Maybe I can afford the ($10). Maybe it’s not as good a product. But it’s got to be honest or they wouldn’t see it on television.”
Photographers working for Children International soon would fan out to Guatemala and elsewhere, taking photos of children like Londy. The photos were sent back to Huntsinger, who tested them to see which ones would attract the most sponsors.
Using a common marketing technique, the organization bought “split runs” in magazines such as TV Guide, Catholic Digest and Fancy Cat. One child’s face would run in half the magazine’s issues and another child’s face in the other half. Huntsinger monitored the response rate to see which photo was more effective. The winner stayed in the next ad buy.
Once Huntsinger found the faces that would sell, he fashioned their life stories into emotive appeals for potential sponsors–all without leaving his office in Richmond, Va.
The girls with riveting eyes who became CI’s poster children had names like Precy and Londy, and the travails of their lives became the touchstone of the organization’s prolific fundraising efforts.
After a photo proved successful in the smaller, less expensive publications, Huntsinger said, it would be used again and again in national circulation and specialty publications, particularly religious magazines.
Like many appeals from other child sponsorship organizations, the prose from Children International about a child’s dire needs often was overstated, according to some of the children the Tribune later visited.
But a former Children International official, Bernard Pope, who served 13 years as treasurer for the organization, defended the ads, saying they were no more deceiving than Nike ads that suggest to American teenagers “how their tennis shoes can make (them) jump 8 feet.”
“Have you seen a non-profit letter asking for money that wasn’t (emotional)?” asked Pope. “This is the reality. If you want the money, you’ve got to appeal to their emotion. That’s the product Children International sells. It’s the `warm and fuzzy.’ “
Huntsinger said he knew where to draw the line between promotion and deception. The copy in the ads remained essentially the same, generic yet highly dramatized. Only the pictures would change.
Huntsinger said he tried to use “symbolic language” in the ads, such as “a child like this needs your love,” so donors wouldn’t question Children International if the child they eventually sponsored was different than the poster child that first drew their attention. Often, Huntsinger’s advertising agency would sponsor the poster child to avoid anyone asking for that specific child.
Success came, although it didn’t come quickly. Several years after Gripkey took over, the National Charities Information Bureau, a charities watchdog group, suggested Children International was insolvent after examining its financial statements.
Gripkey vigorously denied this. However, former CI board member Wallace Keene said that even by the late 1980s the organization was constantly struggling with limited cash flow. At one point, Keene said, the charity had only about $10,000 in reserve. Pope also recalled that in that era, CI executives often would joke about how they were going to pay the next month’s bills.
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Clinging to its identity as a mission in the Holy Land had inhibited the charity’s ability to grow as quickly as the organization desired. So in 1989, the organization began instituting a name change, slowly dropping the Holy Land Christian Mission in some of its mailings and television ads.
The new name chosen was Children International. “A name that pure and simple can’t be wrong,” Huntsinger said. “The product of the charity is children.”
Before the name change took effect, though, the charity secured bequests from its aging donor base that liked the Christian portion of the name, Huntsinger said.
That money, coupled with a surge in new sponsors, enabled the renamed charity to take in more than $54.9 million in sponsor dollars and donated goods by fiscal 1993, up by nearly 100 percent from 1990, according to its tax filings.
As revenues rose so did costs, constantly presenting Gripkey with challenges. He had to pay the bills and continue to grow while maintaining Children International’s place as the low-cost provider.
He tried several approaches, with mixed results.
He launched an aggressive program to get corporate donations. Soon “in-kind” contributions showed up on Children International’s financial statements. Pharmaceutical companies would donate unsold medicines, sometimes including products whose expiration date was near, to Children International, giving the drugmakers some tax benefits, former CI officials said. Children International would then place a value on the contribution, count it as non-cash revenue and give the medicine to clinics or children around the world.
When sponsor contributions flattened, Gripkey abandoned the one child-one sponsor relationship and tried to use the same child for multiple sponsors at $10 a month each. The marketing pitch developed by Huntsinger: Just as it is better for a child to have two parents, it is better for a sponsored child to have more than one sponsor. It didn’t work.
On another occasion, Gripkey raised the monthly sponsorship fee to $14. “That was a total disaster,” Huntsinger said. The fee was later lowered to $12, where it now stands.
Though Children International’s standard low price of $12 a month has great appeal, a sponsor could end up paying the low-cost leader a lot more, all by design.
“Gripkey and I sat down one day talking about the problem of $12 a month,” Huntsinger recalled. “(We thought) what could you do to increase the amount without changing the $12?”
The answer: a plea for additional donations at Christmas, Easter and on the sponsored child’s birthday. When those holidays were not enough, Children International created one–International Special Hug Day.
“They needed another holiday,” said Huntsinger. That worked too.
A sponsor who contributed the suggested $25 in response to each of the four holiday appeals and an additional $25 solicitation for anti-parasite medicine would end up donating an extra $125 a year. Including the regular sponsorship fee of $12 a month, one sponsored child could bring Children International $269 a year.
“We ended up with a lot of sponsors sending money on an annual basis that was a lot more than the other sponsorship organizations,” said Huntsinger.
When Children International saw rates soar for the magazine advertising it relied upon to spread its message, Huntsinger advised Gripkey to increase advertising on upstart cable television stations, where child sponsorship organizations could reach wide audiences at relatively competitive rates or even for free as public service ads.
The trouble was Children International didn’t have a celebrity like Sally Struthers, whose ads for Save the Children and Christian Children’s Fund have become an icon of child sponsorship.
So Huntsinger invented one. “What we did was we selected people who looked like they could be celebrities,” Huntsinger said. Soon cable viewers would see the earnest visage of Walter Coppage fill the screen.
“Hello, I’m Walter Coppage for Children International,” a rich voice intoned, lending a commanding yet comforting presence to the presentation. In the commercial, Coppage simply acts as if everyone should know who he is, while anyone who doesn’t know him could be forgiven. Walter Coppage is a local Kansas City radio personality.
Huntsinger said the ad was exactly what he had in mind–create the illusion of celebrity without the attendant costs and headaches. “You have to be so careful with celebrities. In the end they may end up on drugs or get divorced or have other problems.” With Coppage, he said, he simply positioned him as a personality. “And he carries it off even though he is not a personality.”
But in the early 1990s, Huntsinger hit upon the thing that really worked: the no-money-down sponsorship.
“Gripkey loved it,” Huntsinger said. “We would send out the picture and the case history and the country information.” A potential sponsor could commit without sending in any money, Huntsinger said, adding that the recipient was more likely to write a check when holding a child’s picture in his or her hands.
“All the sociologist types would say that you were manipulating the child,” Huntsinger said. “We found that none of that was true. We started using that phrase `no money down.’ It just shot our returns clear off the charts.”
By 1996, Children International had a roster of some 200,000 contributors and took in more money from child sponsorship than its better known competitor, Save The Children, which relies more heavily on U.S. government grants. In its most recent financial report, Children International’s revenues had reached $65.4 million.
Rather than focusing its efforts on community development like school construction or water projects intended to foster long-term development, Children International says it concentrates on putting personal goods and services like underwear, toothpaste, soap and doctor visits in the hands of poor children.
“The concept that Save the Children creates almost a whole community environment is an interesting concept,” said Huntsinger. “But what Americans really want to do is put some money in that kid’s pocket, give the child some direct benefits. Keep it simple.”
But interviews with Londy’s family and others familiar with the organization raise questions about the impact of the benefits generated by Children International’s policies.
Tribune reporters and editors sponsored four children through Children International for this special report, not including Londy. All the children said the sponsorship provided some goods or services: There were medical and dental checkups, medicine for parasites and other ailments, clothing, shoes, spiral notebooks and pens for school, and hygiene kits containing toothbrushes, toothpaste and soap.
In several cases, though, the goods were jeans that didn’t fit or services that proved inadequate. None of the families described the benefits in terms Children International uses when it assures the sponsor it will work “miracles” in children’s lives.
Although the periodic handouts saved children’s families the expense of purchasing such items, some family members said project workers treated them poorly, ignoring information about children’s clothing sizes and even pleas for urgent medical attention for their children. In other cases the charity’s benefits went unused or were not appropriate for their children’s ages.
“You can get pissy about whether they ask all 200 children what size their shirt is,” said Gripkey responding to the criticism, “but we do what we say we’ll do.”
Londy’s mother said she didn’t want to complain because the aid is a gift. “It’s benefited us a little,” she said, adding that what Londy really needed was help with school tuition. “I’m grateful for what I’ve been given, but I wish they wouldn’t just give us stuff out of a warehouse. Some of the gifts I don’t need.”
She said Londy received some gifts as a result of her sponsorship. But services such as medical care were problematic. In January 1996, she took Londy to a Children International affiliated doctor because the girl was vomiting and fainting.
“The lines (were) very long. I pleaded with him,” Rosa Gomez said. “She’s very sick. You have to take care of her. The doctor said, `No. Stand in line.’ ” Londy’s mother eventually took her to a private clinic where she paid 40 times the fee she would have paid at the CI clinic.
Some of Children International’s competitors say that the concept of offering direct benefits over sustainable development fosters dependence and leaves no lasting impact on children’s lives.
But Gripkey, who stepped down as Children International’s chief executive officer in 1996 to become executive chairman, rejects such a critique.
“You can’t raise money for development,” he said. “How much do you think the public would give to build paved roads in Guatemala?”
“We’re a sponsorship organization,” Gripkey continued. “There’s no big mystery to it. We say the child’s going to receive benefits, we write and tell you what he got. It’s so simple.”