Red Cross spent $500,000 to boost its public image

WASHINGTON — The American Red Cross paid consultants more than $500,000 in the past three years to pitch its name in Hollywood, recruit stars for its "Celebrity Cabinet" and brand its CEO as the face of the Red Cross — just a year before ousting her, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.

In a $127,000 contract, a Houston corporate image company agreed to create a plan to make Red Cross Chief Executive Marsha Evans the face of the organization as part of a "senior leadership branding project" that ran from October 2003 to November 2004.

At the same time, Evans was laying off workers at the Red Cross' blood-services operations and at its Washington headquarters, as well as eliminating merit pay and limiting travel in a bid to cut millions from the national headquarters' budget.

The contract with Public Strategies Inc. pledged to secure at least two "media opportunities" a month for Evans and to get her speaking engagements before influential groups.

In December, Evans abruptly announced her resignation after a falling out with the organization's 50-member Board of Governors.

Red Cross defended the contract, saying Public Strategies landed Evans appearances before high-profile business groups and at other get-togethers, thus boosting donations to the organization when it faced financial difficulties in 2003 and 2004, including a depleted Disaster Relief Fund.

Also in 2003 and 2004, the Red Cross paid a Beverly Hills, Calif., firm $113,900 to promote its name to writers and producers for television and film to get the charity included in story lines.

Red Cross spokeswoman Carrie Martin said the contract has resulted in such successes as Red Cross first-aid kits included in the MTV reality show "The Real World" and Red Cross vehicles used in an episode of the TV drama "The West Wing."

Peter Dobkin Hall, a specialist on nonprofits and a Harvard University lecturer, questioned the strategy's usefulness to the organization, which annually receives more than $500 million in donations.

It's "not as though the Red Cross needed to do it," Hall said. "When disaster happens, people turn to the Red Cross and throw money at them."

Documents made public by a Senate panel Monday showed that at the time the nation's largest charity was reeling from CEO Bernadine Healy's resignation amid charges it had mismanaged Sept. 11 donations, the Red Cross was warned to resolve its internal disputes or risk a repeat of snafus that plagued the 9/11 relief effort.

In an Oct. 29, 2001, e-mail, board member Bill George warned Red Cross chairman David McLaughlin to resolve the group's disputes. "The worst thing we could do is to gloss over the split on the board, make some superficial changes in governance, and see the whole scenario repeated three or four years from now," the Medtronic executive wrote.

Four years later, Evans resigned in the aftermath of Katrina.

The National Response Plan, developed after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, designates the primary role of the Red Cross as providing food, housing and medical care to large numbers of people after disasters, whether human or natural. Some members of the House Select Committee on Katrina have called for the Red Cross to be stripped of that responsibility.

Additional information from The Associated Press and Los Angeles Times