Pi-Consulting

Charitable donations in the USA are on the rise, provided what you’re looking out for is support for truly worthy causes like culture and the arts. The Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University reports that last year Americans gave over $12 billion to organizations for the arts, culture and humanities, an increase of 10%. However, giving to international causes fell by 9% to $11 billion, and donations to human services overall were also off by 9%. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof noted recently that pictures of sad puppies with big eyes and floppy ears are far more effective in stimulating public generosity than reports of human suffering, particularly when thousands or millions of people are involved rather than one individual story. Returning to New York after a visit to Darfur, he was “flummoxed” by the public obsession with saving a red-tailed hawk evicted from its 5th Avenue nest, “which aroused considerably more public indignation than two million homeless Sudanese”. Sources: Wall Street Journal, WARC, New York Times, Pi.

Safe and Healthy Thanksgiving wishes from the Staff at Pi-Consulting and Pi Market Research.

Americans are on a mission to root out their roots. Genealogical searches are becoming more of a passion than a pastime, with the spread of genealogical websites and the wider accessibility of DNA testing. People are switching off the TV and spending hours online, piecing together ever more elaborate family trees. The most widely-used service is ancestry.com, owner of genealogy.com and myfamily.com, which goes beyond root tracing into family networking. Ancestry.com claims 800,000 subscribers, and 14 million registered users. Addicts spend hundreds of hours of their own time tracing their origins, and some even buy the services of professional genealogists, at $25 to $100 an hour. Says one: “I was consumed by finding our story”. One website chief explained the compulsion: “If you’re successful in the early stages, it’s like salted peanuts. Once you start, you won’t stop”. Sources: New York Times, Pi.

For fifteen years, The Nielsen Company, which measures America’s TV audiences through its eponymous ratings service, has separated out Hispanic audiences for special study. In September, they announced that the separate Hispanic ratings service is to be scrapped, and that Latino homes will henceforth be counted along with panel homes of other ethnicities. This might not seem important, but it signals the moment at which one of America’s bellwether research companies saw a great truth: that Latino audiences have grown to the point that they are “just Americans like everybody else”. 12 million homes is no longer a curious minority, it’s part of the mainstream, with vast Hispanic components already evident in the TV audiences of Los Angeles, New York City, and the Miami/Fort Lauderdale conurbation, to name but three. Nativists, please note. Source: Adweek, WARC, Pi.

“You want time off? Sure, kid, but what are you telling me for? Just go, tell me about it when you get back to work”. Some employers, including IBM and Netflix, are telling their workers they can take as much vacation time as they want, whenever, so long as they get their work done. It sounds like a dream, but many employees offered this deal are keenly aware of their ultimate accountability, and typically take less time off than they would formally be entitled to. Another result, though, is people saying “This is a great place to work”. The fact that they are trusted makes for greater commitment. A Netflix HR chief puts it this way: “When you have a workforce of fully-formed professionals, you have a connection between… the work and how long it takes to do it. So you don’t need the clock-in-clock-out mentality”. At IBM, that’s an advantage, considering that 40% of the workforce have no dedicated office, toiling at home or on-site. So who would be watching them anyway? Source: New York Times, Pi

Some time ago, by order of the hip-hop community’s high arbiters of sartorial taste, it was decreed that Thou Shalt Wear Thy Jeans At Half-Mast. Sagging pants, revealing at least eight inches of the boxer shorts worn underneath, became an almost mandatory fashion statement among young male African Americans with attitude. (Not all of them knew where the idea came from: it started in jail, where oversized prison uniforms were issued without belts, to prevent suicide. After the cons stopped laughing, low-slung pants became a wordless invitation to the ‘screws’ to “kiss this”). Now states like Louisiana are invoking indecency laws and trying to criminalize the habit. Wearing your trousers below the Plimsoll Line can cost you a $500 fine in some towns, even get you thrown into jail, where of course the fashion originated. The NAACP takes a dim view. “To criminalize how a person wears their clothing is more offensive than what it is trying to remedy”, says a former executive director there. Source: New York Times, Pi.