I ignored the trending Kony 2012 video for weeks. I had heard of Invisible Children, I was vaguely aware of the LRA, but I don’t have any time or money to give, so I moved on.

And then the controversy started.

After reading a lot of the controversy, and comparing it with IC’s financial statements and responses, I liked the campaign even more. For three main reasons:

1. This is a very worthy campaign.

Let’s remember what we’re really talking about: 30,000 to 100,000 child soldiers and sex slaves over the years. We’re talking about a man on the ICC’s most wanted list. We’re talking about a man who would like nothing more than for the whole campaign to get bogged down in slander and financial reviews and controversy.

This isn’t about Jason Russell. This is about Joseph Kony.

I know that Kony is on the run. I know that his army has dwindled to a few hundred. (Although if someone in the U.S. or Europe had a child army of two hundred kidnapped children, no one would use the term “only.”) And don’t even talk to me about a “white man’s burden” because it makes you look dumb.

A group of young people met injustice and tragedy head-on, and they’re doing big things to fight it.

2. Invisible Children has a good strategy.

I’ve seen their financial statements, and I’m not impressed with the argument that some people don’t like how their expenses break down. 

People want to see one-color pie charts that indicate most of Invisible Children’s money goes to direct aid. It makes us feel good about donating because corporate scandal has made us suspicious.

That’s not how this works anymore.

First of all, Invisible Children is not just about helping victims. They’re about preventing victims too. All of the work that goes into a campaign like this costs money. It makes for more complicated expense reports, and more sliced-up pie charts, but they’re pretty up-front about their mission and their goals. The first thing a visitor sees on the IC website is their mission, which begins:

“Invisible Children uses film, creativity and social action …”

If you don’t like that strategy, that’s fine. There are other organizations you can support. This one, however, seems to be working, so maybe you need to re-think what social activism looks like in a world of Web 2.0. Awareness means pictures and video, and when your subject is in Africa that means travelling to Africa. Applying political pressure means lobbying the capital.

I’ve been using this great site called CharityNavigator for years. They give Invisible Children a four-star financial rating.

3. Invisible Children is WINNING social media

Honestly, I like this campaign because IC is doing it right, and I’m impressed.

There has been all kinds of whining that the social media emphasis and the quick-and-easy “action kit” are creating “fake activists.”

First, I don’t believe in fake activists.

There are probably a lot of new activists, or part-time activists, who are championing the Kony 2012 campaign, but to call someone a “fake activist” is just saying that they don’t do it as well as you do. And this isn’t about you finally getting recognition for all the social activism work you’ve done, or how smart you are.

There’s a very short clip in the Kony 2012 video of a TED Talk by Natalie Warne. She was 18 when she made a huge difference in this campaign. She might have been considered a “fake” activist at first, but she was encouraged, and she stepped into a powerful role.

So what if we took all these young people in their Kony 2012 wristbands and helped them see how they’re changing the world, and how much more of it they can change, instead of calling them “fake activists” and shutting them down?

Second, let’s agree that they are all silly “fake activists,” for the sake of conversation – so what?

It’s working. And if we’re interested at all in helping capture Joseph Kony, we need to let it work.

There are always going to be high school and college kids who wear band t-shirts even though they can’t name any of the band’s albums, or Tapout shirts even though they’ve never been in a fight, or Che shirts even though they have no idea what communism is. Let them wear a Kony 2012 t-shirt instead. Let it pressure them to have an answer for their shirt, or use it to strike up a conversation and teach them about their shirt, or let it incite the curiosity of someone else who sees the shirt.

The idea is to saturate the market and generate a public outcry, because no government is going to do anything that doesn’t line their own pockets without serious public pressure. Abraham Lincoln famously said,

“Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail. Without it, nothing can succeed.”

In a very short time, Invisible Children has amped up the awareness and the public outcry against Joseph Kony, and it’s working.

The truth is, it doesn’t matter if everyone in a Kony 2012 shirt knows the whole story.

It doesn’t matter if they think that Kony is still operating out of Uganda, or if they don’t know that girls are also kidnapped as sex slaves.

What matters is that Joseph Kony is brought to justice, and the painful reality is that it is not going to happen unless some politician feels it will help his ratings. And that is not going to happen unless there’s already a successful campaign to capture Kony in place, that said politician can play off of.

It would be nice if everyone would take the time to educate themselves thoroughly on the issue, but that’s not going to happen. It would be nice if Kony were hunted and captured because the people running the political machine were working in the best interest of impoverished Africans, but that’s not going to happen either.

We have to decide if we’re willing to let the LRA continue operating while we wait for a fully-educated, purely-motivated operation, or whether we’re willing to use the trends of our times and the strategies at hand to finally catch a vicious war criminal.