Lower Than That

I’ve talked about non-profit overhead in this space before, and if you were around for those entries you probably remember me saying something about how the ends of this spectrum are both problematic, in the sense that it isn’t possible to run an organization of any size with all-volunteer labor out of somebody’s living room, but by the same token any group that gets less than 75% of its intake into actually doing whatever it does is probably spending too much on bloated salaries and gold-plated facilities/equipment. To these remarks we should probably add that any group which is spending 5% or less of the money it receives from supporters on actually fulfilling its mission is probably a scam, and if that mission involves granting wishes for terminally ill children, then the scammers who are ripping people off under such a guise should be publicly shamed before being recycled as dog food – or possibly skeet…

By the same token, it would be easy to single out the group mentioned in the Times-Picayune business section (by way of the Nola.com website ) as a particularly egregious example of this sort of outrage – except that they’re not, really. Granted that the “Wishing Well Foundation USA” does appear to be a scam – they took in $1.3 million in 2008 (the last year for which data is available) and spent only $36,000 of it on official activities, which by my calculations is actually 2.7% of their income. But the same records indicate that over $1 million of that went to telemarketing firms, which are often used by small-time charity groups to generate more donations. Meanwhile, the organization’s president received a salary of $63,600 – which is nearly twice what they spent on actual activities, but is still just 4.9% of their income. Unless the person in question owns a significant interest in those telemarketing firms (and the article does not indicate that he does) it’s certainly not a very efficient scam…

Now, I certainly do not advocate giving this group or the people behind it a pass on the accusation of misconduct; it they aren’t actually siphoning off the donations for their own purposes they are, at the very least, running a criminally incompetent organization and doing much more harm than good. It’s not just that they’re squandering money given to them in good faith, they’re also taking that money away from real charities working in the same field (like the Make-A-Wish Foundation, for example) as well as organizations that are actually working on cures for juvenile diseases. But from the information presented, I can’t tell if there is any genuine malfeasance here, or if the people behind this organization are merely well-meaning buffoons – and neither can the crowd of people leaving scathing comments at the bottom of the linked article. What I can tell you is that whether they’re honest or not, the responsibility for making sure that charitable donations go to reputable organizations lies with the people making the donations…

The truth is that in this 21st Century, donating money to charity isn’t that different from any other business transaction, and just as you would check out a business before you gave them your money, you should also investigate any charity that is asking for your donation. You wouldn’t do business with a company that has a zero-stars rating everywhere on the Internet and a Better Business Bureau rating of “Liars, Thieves and Scoundrels,” and you also shouldn’t have anything to do with a charity that has had a Charity Navigator rating of zero out of five stars for the last six fiscal years running…

Because the truth is that people online aren’t any different from people anywhere else, and saying to yourself that no one could stoop so low as to steal money from ordinary hard-working citizens that was intended to grant wishes for terminally ill children is like saying that the nice man selling $25,000 watches for $20 out of an alley must be above-board. Until we wake up to the realities of our brave new digital world, this sort of thing is going to keep on happening, and we will have no one but ourselves to blame…