PimpThisBum.com

http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/03/26/pimp.this.bum/index.html?iref=mpstoryview

http://www.bestweekever.tv/bwe/images/2008/02/ButtcrazyBird.png

"Advocate Michael Faenva, who runs a shelter in Dallas, said, "In the end, this isn't a good strategy to address the problem of homelessness. ... It's not a strategy that's likely to bring help to very many.""

So fucking what?

Does that statement really need a lot of additional thrust?

it's a fair point in the larger sense

i mean sure this one dude (maybe some others? the article wasn't clear) was helped considerably but the site by its very name contributes to the dehumanizing of homeless people. i don't doubt the siterunners' "sincerity" in helping this particular guy but still...

"This is just crazy enough to work," Edwards said.

made me lol

I can't really speak to sincerity, since it doesn't seem like they've even made a claim to sincerity on this point: it seems pretty explicit that their goals and motivation aren't any kind of help-the-homeless outreach or advocacy -- it's a sort of marketing-and-communications experiment that just so happens to positively impact one homeless person, right? (In which case it makes perfect sense to me that if you asked someone actually immersed in homelessness policy/advocacy, he'd say "well this is not particularly any kind of effective way to do anything about the problem of homelessness, and if your goal were to help in a more systematic way, you'd be better off contributing to something else"; he might also pretty reasonably worry that this incursion of private marketing goals into his arena could, in the long term, do PR harm in terms of things he finds much more significant.)

I mean, not that this makes collecting money to send a guy to rehab a bad thing

hence "sincerity"

ah, yes

I don't see how this is a marketing experiment or "private marketing goals" - the son (who isn't in marketing, so far as I can tell) and father wanted to help someone, and dad used his professional experience to make it work better.

Not every good deed has to be designed to eradicate homelessness or alter the landscape - their plan was to help this one guy, and then another, and a few more. That's a perfectly noble goal - interviewing people who are working on a broader scale just to get negative quotes is inane.

I always hated the signs I saw in Deep Ellum telling you not to give money to panhandlers, donate it to Charity X instead. Fuck that. If I've got a couple of extra bucks and it will get the guy in front of me a sandwich, I'm giving it to him.

interviewing people who are working on a broader scale just to get negative quotes is inane.

hardly.

"just to get negative quotes"?? I kinda doubt that's what the journo did. "hi, expert on homelessness, can you give me a negative quote on this?" probably more like "hi, expert on homelessness, what do you think of this thing that helped one guy once?" and he said, predictably, "well it did help one guy once but so what?"

Except that's not the quote that was selected - ""Advocate Michael Faenva, who runs a shelter in Dallas, said, "In the end, this isn't a good strategy to address the problem of homelessness. ... It's not a strategy that's likely to bring help to very many.""

Which is a negative quote, and isn't actually germane - no one involved is arguing that this addresses the overall problem of homelessness or helps "very many." It kind of explicitly helps one guy.

pretty dehumanizing website url though, right?

just wait for the porn industry to catch on and have a website for gay hobo porn - www.pumpmybum.com

milo i'm stumped

The people running this site are individual private citizens specifically requesting donations through the web to help specific homeless people -- if you consider this newsworthy, then it is completely run-of-the-mill germane to ask organized/professional homeless advocates what they thing about this tactic, and it is completely natural for them to point out that, in terms of most efficiently helping solve larger issues of homelessness, donors might be better served by contributing to more organized and systematic groups. That's not a "negative quote" so much as it is asking a specialist/expert to comment on the topic you're covering, and that person responding in accordance with his group's objectives and position, right?

Like I said, none of this makes it somehow "bad" to have helped one specific person -- it's just natural for homeless advocates to point out that the equivalent dollar value could do some wider or greater good if deployed differently.

BTW yes, possibly I was misreading the opening lines, which state (possibly unintentionally) that "When Sean Dolan saw signs being carried by homeless people, he saw an opportunity. He and his father wanted to drive people to a Web site, so they created PimpThisBum.com as a marketing tool and gave a homeless man a sign with the Web site's address"

Actually no, I wasn't misreading the intent there: the "bum-pimping" site is hosted at www.ascendgence.com, home of Ascendgence Tactical Online Marketing

"for the right campaign in the right market," they say, "we have had considerable success with viral marketing campaigns"