Can of Worms

Last week I wrote a post for this space about the growing kerfuffle between the American Cancer Society (ACS) and an atheist group that calls itself the Foundation Beyond Belief (FBB). I don’t have any particular grasp of (or interest in) the debate between religious groups and evangelical atheists; I’ve always felt that both groups are just opposite sides of the same coin, and that neither one has anything to do with business. But I know a few things about non-profit operations and publicity, and I felt that the demand by the FBB to be recognized as a National Partner in the ACS’s annual Relay for Life on the strength of an offer to raise one team and match its collections 1-for-1 was a bit disingenuous. More to the point, perhaps, I felt that the claims that the ACS had rejected the donation because the people making it are atheists were completely missing the point – perhaps deliberately…

First and foremost, the American Cancer Society never refused the donation. Never. Not even for a moment. People continue to insist that the Society is only interested in donations from religious people, or at the very least, from donors who won’t offend religious people – but this isn’t true. According to all of the information I’ve been able to find, ACS donors include people and organizations of every possible description; secular humanists as well as members of every known religion. It’s a list that includes strip clubs as well as churches (no, really; go look it up…), businesses as well as community organizations, schools and homeowner associations, fraternities and sororities, social clubs and bowling leagues, family foundations and private individuals. If all the atheists wanted to do was contribute to the fight against cancer, they would have been welcome to do so – and still will be…

Second, a pledge is not a donation, even if it comes with a 1-for-1 matching pledge from another organization. Some of the people who had been writing to me have objected that there were individual teams that made over $23,000 last year, and with a matching donation might raise $46,000 this year. This might well be true – there’s no published list of how each team did over the past years of the event. But even if that is true, the actual offer was not a pledge of $46,000 or $46; it was the offer of one team plus a 1-for-1 match. If you divide the total collected by the total number of teams over the years you get an average of about $2,800 per team, but the FBB isn’t even promising that. In fact, they’re not promising anything, much less the minimum investment of effort and time required to be named a National Partner…

Third, a lot of people are claiming that the ACS “changed their story” multiple times about what was required to be a National Partner, or even changed what the requirements were in order to exclude the atheists. But this is nonsense; the requirements have changed over the years, as the ACS has focused more on corporate partners in order to increase its reach and recognition, but those standards have been posted on the Society’s website for all to see since well before this flap began. Moreover, you and I were not party to the communications between the Foundation and the Society, and we have only one side’s version of what was said in those discussions…

The reason I felt this was worth discussing in a business blog in the first place was that it falls into our discussions of people who aren’t really customers who demand to be treated like customers, and people who demand consideration to which they are not entitled. Whatever one thinks of atheists or their support organizations, I think we are justified in questioning whether they deserve the same recognition for one vague offer of nothing in particular that a major sponsor like AT&T or Delta gets for sponsoring hundreds of relay teams in dozens of states. It would be like me demanding the same frequent flyer benefits that the New York Times gets, even though they fly hundreds of reporters around the country every week and I only get out of Central Michigan once or twice a year…

None of this will matter to the people who are flaming the ACS, of course, any more than it will matter to the people who keep flaming me (and sending me nasty comments); it’s always easier to run around yelling “WE ARE ATTACKED!” than it is to think – and in this case, it serves their cause better anyway. Or so they believe, at least. To all of my readers (assuming I have readers) I can only say, stick to your convictions and don’t let anyone push you around, whether they claim to have the one true opinion about the nature of the Universe or not. And if you have a few dollars to spare, please give some of them to any anti-cancer organization you like, whether it makes you a National Partner or a Grand Exalted Pooh-Bah or a Special Pioneer Scout Opinion Leader or just says “Thank you” and gets on with the task of eradicating this horrible disease. You’ll be glad you did…