[with addendums ]
‘Tis the season! It starts earlier each year as the shopping season with its commercial, sales, and music now starting to appear in July. In few years, all pretense of traditional Judeo-Christian religious values will have been successfully submerged, subsumed, and re-emerged as one giant new secular-mercantile season that coincides perfectly with the most important religion of them all: The advent of the new football season (eliminating Advent itself), much to the glee of the lefty social(ist) engineers.
And it shall be called—sing it with me:
Fa-La-La-La-Laa-pa-loo-ooo-za! (!די לאַ-לאַ-לאַ-לאַ-פּאַלואָזאַ)
[Ed. postscript added 12/26/18: Take a look at this.]
Many things are indicative of the season besides those mentioned above, including mass solicitations by all manner of allegedly charitable enterprises. I donate to a select group at various times during the year and often come to regret doing so, mostly because of what happens during this time of year. Some of you will nod along with what follows.
You get a solicitation for a donation from a charity and make a donation.
Soon after you begin to get more solicitations from other organizations, each explaining their unique need as they tug at your heartstrings. You may or may not chose to give. Perhaps you chose not to because you contribute once or twice a year through a broad cooperative giving plan such as the United Way through your place of employment, or have a regular allotment taken from your pay to specific charities. Or you simply chose not to. Regardless, these individual solicitations are annoying and you wish they would stop.
They don’t. In fact, they multiply.
It doesn’t take long for you to realize that by giving to one you have painted a target on your back. Your name and contact info has been sold to other organizations willing to pay for access to data of known “warm” donors, thus reducing cold solicitations and associated costs.
And don’t get me started on unsolicited phone solicitations and the tricks they use to try to keep you on the line while the pitch is made. Are you listening all you local and state PBAs with your abysmal solicitation-to-program disbursement ratios? I do not give because of 1) the annoyance factor, and 2) the thinly-veiled coercive quid pro quo arrangement of buying a get-out-jail/traffic-stop-free window-sticker vibe. And I really despise those big gold “Member” badges stuck to the windshield with suction cups given to family members or others who show their “support” with a $300 purchase “donation” to get one and think their defecations don’t stink. They all use them to get away with all manner of this, that, or the other because “my husband’s a cop” (e.g., windshield view obstruction, with rules-for-thee but not-for-me attitude—especially the cops). Nope. You get not one penny from me.
Sorry…not holiday season-related, but I always wanted to get that one off my chest publicly…Back to my other humbug…
So your generosity is rewarded by making yourself a target, a mark, a host for innumerable parasites that now appear seemingly from nowhere and everywhere, trying to glom on to you and suck you dry. Not only do the number of entities trying to tap you increase, but the number of times they each try to tap you increases, more so as the holiday season approaches, and then double-down in December. Case in point…
I got the expected holiday appeals from those I have given to in the past, generally starting early November. That didn’t bother me until one of them began sending out mailings every week. The final straw was this week when I received two different appeals from that same foodbank entity in one day! That really bugged me and got me wondering just how much of the money they receive is spent producing and mailing this constant bombardment of entreaties and exhortations, aided and abetted with blessings of the United States Postal Service looking to keep itself financially afloat.
So I did a little charity due-diligence using Charity Navigator. I began by examining the foodbank that was going overboard on the mailings. Turned out their admin/solicitation expense/program expenditure ratios were, surprisingly, pretty good but could be better if they weren’t mail carpet-bombing me. Once I opened both of the mailings I got on the same day I saw that one was the annoying now-weekly pitch, but the other was a quicky in which they claimed to have a donor who would match up to a certain dollar figure for donations received within a fairly narrow time-frame. Ok, I get it. Donation sent.
I checked out the others I give to and they, too, fared well. Donations sent. Next, I examined others received but had not yet opened. Some of them fared less well in the Navigator analysis. I was really disappointed by one because the cause (wounded veterans) is worthy, but I found another organization in the same sphere (Gary Sinise’s foundation) that was more efficient with their revenues. Contribution sent. [see addendums below starting with the one dated 4/8/19 and the related entries that follow in this ongoing saga]
Despite good numbers, I am perturbed by the salaries of upper-tier managers of these entities. I spent a lot of time researching non-profit law 15 years ago and read a lot of discussions about executive compensation (my nonprofit resources library, including law, is quite large. My primary interest was in trade associations but the fundamentals apply to almost all other nonprofit forms). They all closely monitor other organizations with similar missions, similar revenues, and staff sizes, in and outside of the nonprofit sector, as parameters to compare “reasonableness” of salaries to justify steadily increasing them without triggering increased scrutiny from the IRS. They are very good at it.
One negotiates an increase, say, 3-4%, maybe more, which won’t set off any oversight alarms as to “reasonableness.” Others in the sector see that and use it to justify their desired increase as “reasonable.” They get it. Rinse, repeat. This is how salary creep happens. This strikes me very much like “price fixing” collusion and cartel behavior—and I have no doubt it is based on my reading—successfully covered, validated and obfuscated by lobbying and legal manipulation at all levels of government charged with making the very considerable and ever-increasing body of nonprofit law, and conducting oversight.
I did some research back then and found, as I recall, that there were around 21 university nonprofit management programs in the country at that time. A quick look today finds that number has expanded exponentially. That sits even less well with me. It’s now a broadly ensconced and institutionally self-validated field and pathway to a career of outsized personal financial gain that legally skirts the bedrock principles regarding personal inurement in nonprofit law (“reasonable” salaries are not considered personal inurement under the legal definition. Capice?). It’s all “legal,” but it sure has an unethical whiff about it. Law, like chivalry, isn’t dead, it just smells funny, but is a truly wondrous tool to validate almost anything.
And despite all that is not quite right about it, charitable giving is a good tool, too.
Have a Happy [fill in holiday here]!
Addendum: If you are looking for assistance in evaluating potential donation recipients, you may also want to check out GiveWell. Their analysis is interesting and not without self-admitted errors (as noted in the site main menu bar), but worth a look.
Addendum 4/8/19 While driving to work today I received a phone call from the aforementioned community food bank to which I have donated on several occasions. I was thanked for my previous donation and asked if I received an envelope recently asking for another. I said I get one every week and I’m tired of it. He said that these things are computer generated but he could reduce the solicitations with a keystroke. Imagine that.
I get home from work that night to find an email saying how nice it was to talk to me (obviously computer-generated) and included three places in the text soliciting a donation. I am sending the emails to spam and blocked the phone number.
Addendum 10/11/19 While cooking dinner the phone rings, I answer. The voice says he is calling from the main location in the state for the aforementioned food bank organization. I am immediately irritated but hold my venom and my tongue and decide to hear him out.
He asks if I received a recent snail-mail solicitation for the upcoming Thanksgiving season. I tell him I got something, just like I do every week (letting my agitation begin to show}. He gets defensive saying he is only trying to do his job. He says he could reduce mailings in accordance with my very specific and forceful suggestion of no more than twice yearly. He says he will make a note of it.
I told him I got a similar call a few months back and was told by that guy that he could reduce the number of solicitations. Hasn’t happened. This guy says he sees no such note in my file but will Add one now. My file?
I think they have received their last donation from me.
Addendum 4/23/20
I haven’t received any other phone solicitations from the foodbank but I do still get them in the mail, sometimes still closely spaced. The one most recently received claimed to be dealing with an emergency situation due to the COVID-19 pandemic. I gave it a quick read. I had just received my federal stimulus check and decided to donate a considerable percentage of it to a couple of charities. Despite how I concluded the last addendum, I decided to donate to the foodbank.
I didn’t want to send a check so decided to make the donation online. I got on the site and was immediately taken aback a bit but how slick and professional it looked. Some serious bucks went into producing it.
I located the donation page and was presented with suggested options for donation amounts, including a strong push for regular monthly donations. No, I will elect to make a one-time gift. The option was available so I clicked on it and was presented a new page that wanted my full name and email address—ostensibly so they could send my receipt—valid but deceitful as well. Not wanting one, I checked the available option to donate anonymously. Upon doing so, I was presented another window that wanted the same information!
All this info was being collected in fields that obviously would get fed into their database. Would the info go into my existing file (as noted earlier)? Would it create a new file that would result in receiving more solicitations? Don’t know and don’t want to find out. No donation would be made.
I wanted to vent my displeasure so went searching for the contact page. Once that window opened I was presented with all the same fields to be filled out. I could I have been very slick and entered valid information in those info-collecting fields —just not valid for me–but decided against it so I never the sent the message…or a donation.
Nonprofit operations are just as slick as any other enterprise. And just as expensive, perhaps more so, when it comes to operational overhead. It’s a business, pure and simple.
And some of them just piss me off.
