Picture this: you’re sat in a windowless Pentagon office in 1967, staring at classified reports that make one thing crystal clear – America is losing the Vietnam War. Badly.

The Viet Cong are winning. The South Vietnamese army is crumbling. Every strategy has failed. Your own military analysts have written this down, in black and white, in report after classified report.

But upstairs, politicians are announcing another troop surge. Generals are requesting more funding. The machine grinds on.

Why? According to the Pentagon Papers – those leaked documents that shocked America in 1971 – 70% of the reason was pure face-saving. Nobody wanted to admit they’d been wrong.

Sound familiar?

The Charity Version

Walk into any nonprofit strategy meeting and you’ll hear the same logic. “Our door-to-door campaign didn’t work last year, but let’s try a different script.” “Donor retention is falling, but we just need better storytelling.” “That viral campaign flopped, but social media is definitely the future.”

Meanwhile, the actual data sits buried in someone’s laptop. The honest evaluation nobody wants to read. The results that don’t match the grant application promises.

Welcome to charity sector Vietnam.

When Democrats Got Honest

A fascinating story broke recently about Vote Forward, a progressive group that ran massive letter-writing campaigns for the 2024 US election. They convinced volunteers across America to handwrite personal messages to 5 million potential voters.

The result? Zero impact on turnout. Complete failure.

Here’s the remarkable bit: they published the results anyway.

This is almost unheard of in political campaigning, where organisations are terrified that honest evaluations will kill future funding. As one researcher told The Atlantic: “The attitude is, there’s a lot of hype and willingness to fund this work. If you put this out, all the funders are going to clam up.”

Sound familiar yet?

The File Drawer Problem

Scientists have a name for this: the file drawer problem. Studies that don’t show positive results get shoved in drawers and forgotten. Only the successes get published, creating a completely distorted view of what actually works.

Charities do this constantly. The Facebook campaign that bombed? Never mentioned again. The celebrity endorsement that achieved nothing? Quietly forgotten. The expensive rebrand that confused donors? Let’s talk about something else.

Meanwhile, the sector keeps funding the same failed approaches because nobody admits they don’t work.

The Upton Sinclair Trap

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

This explains everything. The fundraising consultant can’t admit direct mail is dying – they’d lose clients. The digital agency can’t acknowledge their social media strategy failed – there goes the retainer. The CEO can’t admit their pet project flopped – career suicide.

So everyone pretends it’s working. Tweaks the messaging. Tries a different angle. Anything except admitting the fundamental approach is wrong.

The Real Cost

This isn’t just wasteful – it’s actively harmful. Every pound spent on ineffective campaigns is a pound not spent on approaches that might actually work. Every month chasing yesterday’s tactics is a month further behind organisations that adapt.

Worse, it’s dishonest to supporters. Donors give money to change the world, not to fund somebody’s professional reputation protection scheme.

The Way Forward

Some organisations are getting this right. Movement Labs, mentioned in that Atlantic piece, has launched something called the “Prove It Prize” – paying groups to rigorously test their campaigns and publish all results, positive or negative.

Brilliant. Create financial incentives for honesty instead of financial penalties.

The most successful charities already think this way. They test everything, measure ruthlessly, and kill programmes that don’t work. They treat failures as data, not disasters.

They understand that admitting mistakes isn’t weakness – it’s the only way to get stronger.

The Vietnam Lesson

The Pentagon Papers revealed something devastating: by 1965, US military leaders knew the war was unwinnable. But they kept fighting for eight more years, spending billions and losing 50,000 more American lives, primarily to avoid admitting failure.

The charity sector faces a choice. Keep funding approaches that worked ten years ago but don’t work now, or have the courage to look at what’s actually happening and change course.

Your supporters will forgive honest mistakes. They won’t forgive deliberate self-deception.

The truth might hurt your ego, but lies will kill your mission.

And unlike Vietnam, nobody has to die for you to figure this out.

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Fuzzy Logic is a series from Hope, a charity branding and creative agency. The series explores the imprecise and uncertain world of marketing, persuasion, fundraising, and allied fields, particularly as they apply to charities, social impact businesses, causes and not-for-profits. Written by Michael Isaacs.