Never in a million years did I think I would work for a charity, let alone be the CEO of one by the age of 24.

I graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) with a degree in applied mathematics and was working in investment banking. But in 2005, my life changed forever when I saw a documentary film called Invisible Children: Rough Cut. The film was about kids in northern Uganda running for their lives out of fear of being abducted and turned into child soldiers by Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony and his rebel army called the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). It had been made by three of my friends who had just finished film school.

I was so inspired by their passion I ended up leaving my job to help the filmmakers turn the film into Invisible Children, an international NGO that campaigned for the arrest of Kony.

At first, we were throwing down huge goals and everything was paying off. We passed a bill through the US Congress which mandated that President Obama support the regional effort to stop the violence, got an unprecedented deployment of US special forces to track down the LRA and raised almost $50m.

We did all of this before we created our 11th campaign, Kony 2012. Our goal – which we really thought was ambitious - was to get 500,000 views of the film during 2012. We launched the film on 5 March 2012 and got 100 million views in six days. You probably know what happened next – the subsequent backlash, the public breakdown of our charismatic founder Jason Russell. All of this happened within only 10 days of the launch of the film. It was hands down the most overwhelming time of my life. We had become “controversial” (to put it mildly) and public school leaders wanted no more to do with us.



In the long term, this would prove an insurmountable problem as our core model of hosting thousands of screenings at high schools and colleges dried up - and with it, so did our fundraising engine. Our revenue dropped 81% from 2012 to 2013.

The next two years were incredibly hard. We tried to reinvent our fundraising model to include more traditional grants and major gifts but only had limited success. By the end of 2013 it was clear that big changes had to be made. After a seven-figure grant fell through, we downsized our US staff of 60 by over 50%. Even with this staff cut, we had to nearly double our revenue to be sustainable at that size.



Eventually, it came down to one major choice: broaden the scope of our mission massively to include new issues with easier funding opportunities, or stay focused on our LRA commitments at a much smaller size.



I chose the latter. But this meant that almost our entire US team, including myself, would willingly work ourselves out of our jobs.

Ben Keesey joined Invisible Children as their chief financial officer in 2005, before becoming CEO in 2007. Photograph: Invisible Children

On 17 December 2014 we announced to the world that we were shutting down almost all of our organisation to prioritise our work in central Africa and our advocacy in DC. With it, myself as CEO, Jason as founder and 20 of our remaining 25 US staff would leave within the year. The remaining five staff would continue our political advocacy in DC and our work with partners in central Africa on a much smaller scale.

On that day I woke up with the nerves already flowing through my system. I got ready for work, in tears almost the whole time, and I kept saying to myself: “I don’t want to do what I am going to do today.” Getting to the office that morning was tough, but we were prepared. The emails had been written, the web copy drafted, call scripts created.

Gathered together as a team, we sent out our announcement and then personally called about 2,500 of our donors. We wanted everyone to know why this change was happening since it would come as a shock for many. The hardest part in all of it was that we were trying to tell the real story.



We were really tempted (and strongly encouraged) to put a PR spin on it and just declare, “mission accomplished.” Since our campaign in 2012 and massive programme investments with our partners, we had seen over a 90% reduction in LRA killings, a 70% decline in their overall fighting force, four out of the top five LRA commanders off the battlefield and hundreds of thousands of people returned home from displacement. We could have just cited those numbers and said, “We did it. It’s time to pack up.”



We wanted to say that, but that wasn’t the whole story, and NGOs rarely tell the whole story. We as an industry almost never talk about what hasn’t worked or what didn’t go according to plan.

Look at every annual report that has ever been put out. We all claim that we are winning all the time, no matter what is actually going on. The truth at Invisible Children was that the work wasn’t all done and we tried incredibly hard to reinvent our funding model to avoid this big downsize, and it didn’t work. Saying that was scary.

Through this process, it made sense why so many in the NGO world talk about the goal to “put themselves out of a job” and yet so few (if any) actually do it. Because it is really freaking difficult and it feels like failure. There are no incentives or celebrations. There’s no support and almost no precedent. It really hurts to say goodbye to your team and to walk yourself out the door instead of chasing money for other issues to just keep the machine running.



However, when it is the right decision, staying focused to your core mission even at a smaller size – is extremely powerful. I believe that being honest when a course correction is needed ultimately grows the trust that the public has for our sector. We actually raised close to a million dollars in the two months after our announcement to continue funding our work in central Africa, and I believe that’s because people respected that we were being honest and they knew that our work was still needed.

It is time for our industry to support the focused and effective pursuits of specific problems, and to be honest even when things don’t go exactly to plan. No reasonable person believes that all organisations can be winning all of the time, and we as a community should feel safe to talk about that reality. And, in the rare cases when an organisation actually gets close to their “finish line”, let’s all support them, keeping in mind that the last few yards are always the hardest part.

Ben Keesey was chief executive of Invisible Children from May 2007- January 2015.

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