Tag Archives: media

Newsday: The Big Deal About Goats

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If you’ve ever read the children’s book Beatrice’s Goat, you understand immediately what Heifer’s work is meant to accomplish. With a small input such as a goat, a family in poverty soon has a way to grow income and move toward sustainability.

Beatrice Biira visits children in Ireland in 2006. Photo courtesy of Heifer International.

As we’ve mentioned before, Heifer is now lucky enough to have Beatrice Biira on our staff doing community engagement in New York.

Newsday, a daily newspaper that serves the New York metropolitan area, today published a column by Jennifer Wheary on Biira with the following intro:

At 28, Beatrice Biira has had experiences that most of us will never have in our entire lives. She’s been on “60 Minutes,” “Good Morning America” and “Oprah.” She was the subject of an award-winning, bestselling 2001 children’s book called “Beatrice’s Goat.” She’s met celebrities and been featured in People magazine and The New York Times. She interned for Hillary Clinton when she was a U.S. senator and captured the attention of internationally renowned economist Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University.

Sachs was so inspired by Biira that he created a theorem for her. The “Beatrice Theorem” simply and powerfully states that: “Small inputs can lead to large outcomes.”

Check out the full column here, and please comment with suggestions on how Biira and other Heifer staff and volunteers can help even more families by telling others about Heifer’s work.

Heifer on Letterman, Super Bowl

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OK, sorta. It’s not the Top Ten List, but we have made the “Letterman Screen” in Times Square, NYC (also known as the CBS Super Screen) and will appear on video screens at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis during the Super Bowl.

For the Letterman board, between midnight, January 16 and March 31, Heifer’s 15-second animated video spot will be shown 1,368 times at one of the busiest and most famous crossroads in America.

A CBS staffer who donates to Heifer shared some Heifer materials with the media director of CBS Electronics (who had never heard of us, but loved us and our work after she read up on us). When one of their clients had to change their media plans at the last minute, CBS had some highly sought-after space they were willing to share with us. The spot is estimated to be seen by 1.5 million people every day. Whoa.

Just yesterday, we got an offer from another media outlet who handles on-site media for the Super Bowl at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis. They want to let Heifer run a short video spot on screens around the stadium for 15 hours surrounding the big game this Sunday. We were able to adapt the spot from the Letterman board to the Super Bowl requirements, so we didn’t have to create new materials. As you watch pre-game coverage, look for our spot to play eight times per hour. The media company estimates we’ll get about a million media impressions from people actually at the location. That doesn’t even include the multi-millions at home who may see the screen during television coverage.

Coming from an advertising agency background (where clients pay big bucks to get their message in the public eye), I’m always amazed and impressed at how fortunate we are that there are people in the media business who badly want to help us advance our mission.

Oh, and if you’re in NYC between now and March 31 (or if you’re lucky enough to have tickets to the Super Bowl), snap a quick photo and tweet it to us (@heifer) or share it on our Facebook page.

Ukrainian Media Like Heifer

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Yes, Pierre Ferrari is “good copy,” but I think there’s another reason that he’s been interviewed four-five times on his current trip to Ukraine. To paraphrase James Carville, “it’s the work, stupid.”

In fact, while Pierre was interviewed for a Ukrainian newspaper at one table in our hotel, county director Victor Teres was being interviewed at another table for a Ukrainian television network. I interviewed the interviewers afterwards to find out why.

Lena Shramko of “Kontrakty” magazine covers agricultural issues in Ukraine. She’s very selective about the people she interviews. When the head of the oblast (similar to a state) council suggested she talk to Heifer International, she followed through. Her impression: the work is very positive, especially in light of the difficulty Ukrainian farmers face in securing credit. The topic is very top-of-mind here, and was the subject of government-sponsored round table discussions this summer. “There’s not a lot of analytics on the subject and I was eager to meet someone new and hear what they have to say.” Lena left the interview interested and impressed; she will publish the interview and provide footnotes and background information on the organization in an upcoming interview.

Tetjana Motsyk covers European issues for UTR (Ukrainian TeleRadio Broadcasting). UTR broadcasts worldwide to the Ukrainian diaspora. Like Lena, she was also unfamiliar with Heifer, and came to cover the organization on assignment. Because her beat exposes her to international partnerships, she wanted to find out what Heifer is all about. With her interest in international development, she said she will tell her audience about Heifer’s mission, work, results and commitment in Ukraine.

OK, I’ll admit I was hoping both journalists would gush and wax eloquent about our work here, but that’s not what journalists do, right, Annie Bergman? But bottom line: there IS a great interest in our work here and that’s gratifying. These journalists are part of the international media; they’re interested, and they’re reporting. That in itself is a victory for Heifer. The more people know, the better. Feel free to share this link with your friends, by the way.