>Was that the best use of $12 million?
Why do you act as if that was the only $12 million available to spend? It's not a zero-sum game. People could go to a demo, make contributions there, feel more inspired to contribute and volunteer when they go back home, etc.
If you want to play aggregation games, here's another: $12 million is nothing. It's 0.00012% of total personal income in the US. You could organize a thousand of them before it even becomes a rounding error in the national income accounts.
Doug