The Ethics of Pink

There was an article this week in the Guardian online site regarding the use of October as Breast Cancer Awareness Month and the proliferation of pink products – or things temporarily give a pink package with the promise of donations made to various anti-cancer groups. One of the author’s points was that while the donations are all very well and good, most of the companies offering a temporary pink label are also using their participation in such programs as a marketing tool – the idea being that you will be more likely to purchase additional cartons of yoghurt, for example, if you think some of the proceeds are going to a good cause. The author – and a number of other Survivors I have known – would really prefer that you buy as much yoghurt (or whatever) as you were going to purchase anyway, and then donate the extra funds directly for anti-cancer research and treatment. I thought we should take a closer look at the question…

On the one hand, there is no doubt that some donations to anti-cancer groups are better than no funds, and any activity which helps lead to a cure – or even wider prevention and treatment – of this horrible disease is a good thing in my book. By the same token, it’s difficult to argue with additional awareness efforts. All charities and causes tend to get lost in the clutter of the hundreds (or thousands) of other agencies trying to raise funds for their particular issue, and having brightly-colored packages placed in public to remind people of your cause is certainly a good thing. If seeing a pink carton of dairy products reminds someone that people in their community needs help, and part of the sale price of those products is being donated to that cause, it’s difficult to see how the company taking part is doing anything wrong…

By the same token, however, it’s also difficult to argue that buying one carton of yoghurt to generate a 30-cent donation and then donating $3 directly is going to have more impact than buying two cartons and generating a 60-cent donation would. And if the company is donating 10% of their profits, not 10% of the purchase price, the actual impact of the product-purchase donation is going to be even smaller (12 cents versus $3.06 in the example given above). More to the point, perhaps, unless the company is donating more money than what they will be getting from the extra sales they can reasonably expect to make as part of the promotion, this whole exercise becomes a revenue-enhancement for the company, to say nothing of whatever future sales increases they may experience once consumers get used to using double portions of their product…

No reasonable person is going to expect a for-profit company not to pursue profits; as previously noted in this space, that is why companies exist in the first place, and their success can be demonstrated to have a positive effect on the quality of life experienced by their employees, their stockholders, and ultimately everyone else connected with them. But if one of these awareness month promotions involves spending $1,000 on an un-needed consumer product (the author’s example is a pair of pink shoes) to get a $50 donation, as opposed to buying a $200 pair of shoes and donating another $200 to anti-cancer research (and banking the rest for more important uses), then it’s hard to say if this is more to the benefit of the charity or the shoe company. Which leads me to the question:

Assuming that a for-profit company wants to contribute to anti-cancer research, treatment and awareness, do they have any ethical responsibility to ensure that any resulting uptick in sales does not benefit them more than it does the charities they support? Can they reasonably assume that a customer’s extra disposable income would have be donated to charity if it wasn’t spent on their product? If their pink promotion does result in higher donations to cancer-related charities than those same agencies would have had without the promotion, does it really matter if the company does well for itself out of the deal? Does our answer change if the company’s success allows them to offer better wages and better health coverage, allowing more of their employees to get appropriate screenings and treatment for cancer themselves? And in any case, where do we draw that line?

It’s worth thinking about…

Not Again...

Since I started keeping this blog in 2007 I’ve brought you a number of stories about financial misconduct, management misconduct, and outright fraud in the nonprofit sector, and ranted about the responsibility of donors to investigate the organizations to which they give their money. It’s always been hard for me to fathom why people get taken in by scams of this type when there is information available online for free that would completely debunk the so-called charity that is trying to get money out of them. But then, people keep falling for the Nigerian Royalty scam, too, just as their parents or grandparents fell for the Spanish Prisoner con on which the Nigerian email scam is based – and despite dozens or hundreds of online resources that would debunk every version of that fraud. It doesn’t look as if things are going to be changing any time soon…

A case in point would be the alleged Veteran’s charity group calling itself the Disabled Veterans National Foundation, based in Washington D.C. You can pick up the story on the CNN website if you want to, or look them up on Charity Watch, but the facts of the case seem clear enough. The Foundation claims to provide services and resources for disabled veterans, but according to their published records they’ve received $55.9 million over the past five years and spent $61 million to the marketing firm that handles their marketing and direct solicitation funds. It’s not clear from the agency’s paperwork how giving tens of millions of dollars to for-profit marketing companies is supposed to help disabled veterans or anyone else; it’s also not clear where the extra $5 million came from, although I imagine the IRS will be looking into that. It’s also not clear what financial relationship exists between the people running the so-called charity and the people who own the marketing companies, but I’d bet you cash there is one…

Once the people running the Foundation realized that they’d been found out they started some of the most farcical damage control efforts I’ve ever seen, sending out what appear to be random lots of consumer products acquired in bulk (and presumably at a steep discount) to a couple of local veterans’ groups – both of which appear to be baffled by the “donations” and completely at a loss about what to do with them. In fairness, it’s hard to imagine what an agency working with disabled veterans is supposed to do with 2,600 bags of cough drops, 2,200 little bottles of hand sanitizer, needlepoint pillow designs, acrylic paints or 11,520 bags (80 gross) of coconut M&Ms, but it’s even harder to imagine how anybody could imagine that this would look enough like a legitimate donation to provide any cover…

Okay, it’s an old story – except for the random “donations,” which I feel are particularly manic – and readers of this blog (assuming I have readers) have heard it all before. I call it to your attention again specifically because it is an old story, and it isn’t going to go away – but this may be the first time in history when it is really possible to fight back. Fake charity scams are the counterpart of the Nigerian Royalty email, preying upon guilt instead of greed – a motivation just as basic, and just as human – and they aren’t going to stop any time soon. But debunking them no longer requires specialized education, professional training, or bitter experience. Just as it isn’t possible for some random know-it-all on the barstool next to you to snow you with a bunch of fake “knowledge” if you’ve got a web-enabled phone in your pocket, it isn’t possible for anyone to sell you on a fake charity when you can visit Charity Watch or Charity Navigator or any one of a dozen other resources before you give them a dime…

Bad at Math

Some years ago, someone told me that my deficiency in mathematics (their words, not mine) would prevent me from obtaining an MBA, let alone a MS in Business Research, a position as a management consultant, a position as a business teacher, or indeed most of the things I have done for a living over the ensuing twenty years. When I asked why, he informed me that a manager who has poor math skills will be prone to making erroneous statements and actual operational errors which, no matter how earnest or well intentioned he or she might be, would doom his or her operations as well as making him or her look like a complete idiot. Having just viewed the most recent gaff made by the Republican presidential frontrunner, I believe I may owe that long-forgotten adviser an apology…

If you haven’t seen it, you can view the basic clip here; I’ve watched the longer segment from which this clip was taken, but regrettably this does not appear to have been taken out of context. Governor Romney really is discussing “getting rid of” Planned Parenthood, a non-profit organization over which he has no control, and of which some 69% of all Americans approve and want to continue funding. This may be considered pandering to the nation’s conservatives, many of whom make occasional efforts to de-fund the agency, but can’t be considered a realistic goal for any Federal official (even the President), given that not only does two-thirds of the agency’s funding come from private and foundation sources, but also considering that Planned Parenthood provides any number of services that the Federal government would otherwise have to provide…

Now, I realize that I don’t usually discuss political issues in this space; none of my degrees are in law, political science, public policy, or even finance (much less medicine), and I try to leave such topics to those better equipped to discuss them intelligently. In this case, however, Mr. Romney is trying to represent himself as a successful businessman, and arguing that this factor makes him the superior choice for President – and this is, clearly, nonsense. While the former governor may, in fact, be a competent manager (I can’t tell without auditing his books, and neither can you), he seems to be unclear on the basic math of the situation – that 69% is larger than 31%, for example, or that defunding 32% of a non-profit agency will not force it out of operations, or even that the majority of the voting population of the United States is female…

Even worse, in my opinion, is Mr. Romney’s apparent lack of understanding regarding Law or Government. Short of passing a Federal statute that outlaws everything Planned Parenthood does – not just abortions, but contraception, family planning, education, basic health services, the works – there is no way the Federal government can do anything to “get rid of” the agency. And the President can’t even do that; the Executive Branch does not pass laws, and attempting something so wide-ranging by Executive Order would be problematic at best. This isn’t a math issue, of course; it’s more a matter for Civics class or perhaps American History. Unfortunately, both of these subjects are also taught in elementary school, and any reasonably bright ten-year-old in America would realize that this is just as idiotic from a Government point of view as it is from a Mathematics standpoint…

This doesn’t even consider the cost-benefit analysis of a government action that would anger and offend more than 70% of the population, or the probable cost to one’s political campaign of coming out in favor of such an action, but I think you take my point. Anybody who can’t grasp that for every person you’re pandering to with a specific promise you’re offending two others would have difficulty running a lemonade stand, let alone a country. And I certainly wouldn’t want him serving as the CEO of any company in which I’ve invested money…

The Ethics of Titles

A few weeks back there was a story running around the news sites about the director of a major social service agency who had once served in a high national office, and how she was now requiring everyone who worked for the agency to address her by her former title, rather than as Ms (or by her first name). If you’ve spent any time on the non-profit side of business you already know that this is a bit eccentric; most non-profits are managed and operated by people who care about the cause they are working on, or at least about the constituency they are trying to serve, to the exclusion of money, fame, status or any other common motivation. They are unlikely to request any special title or form of address, and even less likely to tolerate being required to acknowledge someone’s status in any other organization. But just because such a requirement is eccentric, not to mention arrogant, does that mean it is also unethical?

There are any number of high-ranking posts that include a permanent title as one of the perks of the job. Someone who has previously served as the governor of a state, for example, is correctly addressed as Governor Whoever, even if their term ended decades ago and they have never returned to public life. One could certainly argue that anyone who has devoted the time and effort required to achieve high public office – and then served in that position with any degree of distinction – has earned the right to be accorded with a title of honor from then on. Where this convention becomes murky is when these honors are claimed by people who have never been elected to any post; who served in appointed positions at the pleasure of an executive who may have been merely returning an old favor or rewarding a trusted crony (with no particular virtues beyond loyalty to his or her patron). Continued use of the title is still legal, but requiring people to acknowledge your achievements when all you have accomplished is toadying, boot licking and the like seems a bit questionable…

On the other hand, most non-profit organizations require working ridiculous hours under impossible conditions in the pursuit of solutions to impossible problems for insultingly low compensation – and that’s just for the temps; most of the permanent staff have it even worse. Anyone who has given up a comfortable, high-paying, well-respected position offering perks like a permanent title in order to manage such an agency is probably entitled to anything that makes them feel better – assuming, of course, that it doesn’t undermine the agency or its mission. The problem is that all of the other employees of your average non-profit have also given up higher-paying jobs with more perks and better working conditions – sacrificed, in other words, just as the executives have, and frequently without the benefits of a fancy title to use or a staff of subordinates to feel superior to. Such people may be willing to accept the conditions they work under because the agency offers them a chance to participate in making a better world – but they’re unlikely to be impressed by anyone else’s sacrifices, given the ones they are already making…

In the long run, most of the people who are committed enough to a cause to work full time for an agency that works on that cause don’t really care what the people at the top want to be called, so long as they are good for the agency and ultimately for the cause itself. The question is, all else being equal, should the agency encourage the use of first names (or some other egalitarian form of address) in order to foster a collegial atmosphere, or use any available measures of respect (titles or otherwise) in order to express appreciation for people with experience, influence or connections who are willing to lend their credentials to the enterprise?

It’s worth thinking about…

The Game Goes On

A decade or so ago, when I was still a management consultant, a call came in to our office one afternoon from a social service agency we had done some work for in central California. The Executive Director was very excited about the potential for qualifying for grant money under Proposition 10, the California Anti-Smoking initiative. Fund development – and specifically grant writing – was a major part of our practice at the time, and the opportunity to develop a grant application for a client would generally have been a very welcome thing – except that the agency in question didn’t do that. They didn’t run smoking prevention programs, or even help people to stop smoking; they were a teen pregnancy prevention and education agency…

When we told the Executive Director (as gently as possible) that his agency didn’t do anything that could be paid for under Prop 10, and therefore would not be considered for grants under that budget, it didn’t seem to faze him in the slightest. “Oh, that’s all right!” he exclaimed. “We’ll just make something up!”

I’m still not sure what kind of spurious logic they would have come up with to qualify for such a grant (smoking during pregnancy is extremely unhealthy, of course, but the agency was already trying to prevent their clients from becoming pregnant); we managed to explain to the Executive Director that applying for funding that is not appropriate to your agency/program is a waste of time and money, and in this case they’d still have to pay us for writing the application if the grant wasn’t awarded. What makes this story worth repeating is that this specific strategic error (we used to call it “chasing the money” in our practice) is probably the single most common mistake you will see in the nonprofit sector, where agencies all too often waste their time and resources applying for grant funds they have no chance of receiving. Well, that and the fact that half of the States appear to be making the same mistake with the national foreclosure settlement funds…

You can pick up the original story on the Huffington Post Business page if you want to, but the basic idea is that a portion of the settlement reached on the foreclosure crisis is discretionary, meaning that the different states will be sharing $2.7 billion in funds that they don’t, technically, have to spend on foreclosure-related costs. Since this money is arriving at a time when a number of state and local governments are trying to deal with massive budget deficits (and possible bankruptcy), a number of them are considering using these funds for more immediate needs – much as they did with the tobacco company settlement funds a decade or so ago…

Now, I’m not suggesting that the states shouldn’t be given the discretion to spend their discretionary funds however they want. And I’m not claiming to be an expert on public policy, especially state-level fiscal policy. But if history tells us anything about economic crises, it’s that you can’t save your way out of them. Using those funds to help people who are being foreclosed out of their homes (their actual residences, not investment properties or vacation homes) should, in theory, return several times that many dollars into the state’s economy, whereas spending the same amount of money to reduce your budget deficit will get people writing unkind stories about you on news sites and convince your constituents that you don’t care about them – and it won’t fix your state’s economy anyway…

I can’t really fault the governors – or other local officials – for wanting to spend any available discretionary funds on balancing their budgets; in an economic crisis the natural response is to concentrate funds on the immediate expenses. But if two unknown management consultants in a small office in Santa Monica can tell you why this is a bad idea, it’s hard to believe that no one in any of the applicable state capitals has brought this up. Let’s just hope somebody is listening…

Like a Business

Earlier this week I read a story in the Los Angeles Times about how as many as 200 small non-profit organizations appear to have been bilked out of some (or all) of their donated funds by an agency they were also using as their fiscal agent. The amounts in question range from $2,000 to nearly $400,000, and the agencies that have been cheated include everything from political and lobby groups to conservation and child welfare groups; collectively, a significant number of the small non-profits that flourish exotically along the coastal regions of California. The question that kept coming up (both in the story and in the comments) was how this could happen to non-profit groups who are innocently trying to make a better world; how could anyone be so heartless and cruel? The question that kept coming up in my mind was how can anyone be so naïve? Or, at least, it would have been if I hadn’t seen this kind of thing before…

For those who have never spent time on the non-profit side of the street, a fiscal agent (sometimes called a fiscal sponsor) is an agency that provides administrative services for a non-profit that can’t (or doesn’t want to) take care of such functions on its own. In much the same way that a lot of small companies employ a payroll service (one of the companies I used to work for used ADP, for example), a small non-profit can hire such an agency to accept donations, pay its bills, file necessary paperwork and so on – leaving the people who run the non-profit group with more time to work on their actual cause. This can be much more efficient that hiring full-time office staff, especially if the agency is so small that there would only be a few hours for an office manager to do each month. Unfortunately, this sort of arrangement also means that the agency’s leaders are allowing a third party company to control their finances…

Consider, for a moment, whether you’d allow a private company to access your checking account, write checks on your behalf, pay amounts that it feels are appropriate without telling you – and pay itself out of your funds for doing this. Not a bank, mind you; there was no Federal guarantee of your deposits, no oversight from any level of the government, no insurance on your funds. Just a private company – and a for-profit one, at that – run by people who claim to be honest and trustworthy. As a private citizen you might go along with this – it would depend on how much you hate writing checks and depositing incoming funds – but a business doing this without some serious safety measures would run somewhere between gross incompetence (for a sole proprietorship) and complete fiduciary misconduct (for a corporation). Now, consider that however much they may hate to admit it, all non-profit groups (everyone operating under Section 501c of the tax code, including 501c3 charity groups) are corporations operating under the corporate regulations of the state in which they are registered…

I’m not saying that all fiscal agents are corrupt, or that all such relationships are unwise; I’ve worked with some quite large non-profits that used fiscal agent arrangement to good effect, and prospered as a result. But all of those cases involved using a city government, a state agency, or (in some instances) a larger non-profit foundation as the fiscal agent – and the people running the non-profit still kept a very close eye on their partners. What I am criticizing in this post is an agency handing its funds over to a private company on the basis of the company’s CEO having worked for other fiscal agencies and worked on environmental causes – and then assuming that nothing could possibly go wrong because they are a non-profit agency trying to do good for all mankind…

As I’ve noted before in this space, a non-profit corporation can do anything that a for-profit company can do, except turn a profit. Unfortunately, this includes being bilked by unscrupulous, corrupt, or simply incompetent contractors, and neither will a non-profits good intentions and good works do it any good in court. People in the non-profit sector are always talking about running their agencies “more like a business” – except when that would involve learning about business, learning about running a business, or doing the boring, tedious, and critical parts of running a business (such as depositing donations and paying bills). Until “running the agency like a business” becomes more of a priority and less of a catchphrase, stories like this one are just going to keep happening…

Free Markets and Drug Shortages

Earlier today I noticed a news story on the ABC News website about a critical national drug shortage, specifically of one of the drugs used to fight childhood leukemia. I hit the link expecting to see something about insurance companies not covering it or drug companies marking up the price in order to try to recover the R&D costs of inventing the stuff in the first place, but that’s not what I found. At least five different companies have been making the drug in question, and there appear to be generic versions available from other sources as well. The shortages are being blamed on problems in production, limited availability of raw materials, and even high demand, but the truth seems to be that there just isn’t enough of a profit margin on this drug for the companies to bother about making very much of it. The real question is what to do about the situation…

In a free market what usually happens is that as demand for a product rises so does the amount that people are willing to pay for it; eventually the price becomes high enough to make production of the product attractive, and more companies start producing it. This is what will probably happen in the current case, as well – but that will be cold comfort to the children who will die in the interim because there wasn’t enough of the drug available when they needed it. The American Cancer Society, through its Cancer Action Network, is supporting a measure in Congress that will allow the Food and Drug Administration to require advance notice from the drug companies of conditions that might lead to a shortage, but the ACS people admit that this is only the first step in dealing with the problem – and it isn’t clear what the next steps might be…

History indicates that it is possible for the Federal government to require production of specific drugs – in cases where national defense is at stake, for example – without disrupting the free market or putting the pharmaceutical industry out of business. But the government has no means of making drugs on its own, and requiring a company to make products that it can’t sell at a profit isn’t practical in the long run unless the government can make good the difference though the use of public funds. Healthcare providers can’t stockpile every potentially life-saving drug in every facility that might need some, and even if they could the price would be impossible. Patients can’t keep a supply of drugs around; even if they could somehow induce their insurance companies to cover the cost, many of these treatments (including the one in the story) are injection-only, and require professional supervision to use. And non-profit and NGO agencies have all of those issues and more besides…

What strikes me as ironic about the situation is that we normally associate artificial shortages like this one with cases where a single company controls the rights or patents to a specific drug and refuses to make more doses in order to support the price. Generic versions are supposed to combat these crises by increasing supply and lowering demand, but this is the first case I’ve heard about where the ability to create generics has lowered the market price to the point where no one can afford to make it anymore. It is literally the drug industry’s collective argument against generics come to life. I just hope the notification law works, because for years the industry has been claiming that any government attempt to control how much of which products they have to make would be the first step toward nationalizing the industry – and it turns out they were right all along about the generics…

Flushing Your Brand

It has been observed that a brand identity is like any other reputation – it takes years to develop, influences all of your relationships and transactions, and requires only suspicion (not facts) to compromise. In a business context it’s almost impossible to overstate the importance of your organization; people who know absolutely nothing about your company will assume that you have any number of positive attributes (fair prices, good quality, honest personnel, responsible fiscal or environmental policy, and much more) if you have developed and maintained the reputation for having these things. This is why many organizations are as worried about their brand identity as any high school kid is about his or her reputation – and why it’s so very bizarre to see a large and prestigious agency flush theirs for no apparent reason…

If you haven’t been following the story about the de-funding of Planned Parenthood by the Susan G. Komen Foundation, you can pick up the story from the Atlantic web site here if you want to. It seems that the Komen Foundation has been giving money to Planned Parenthood for mammograms and breast cancer screenings for a number of years now, but recently decided to sever that relationship because Planned Parenthood is under investigation by a Congressional committee, and a newly-written bylaw says the Foundation can’t support agencies that are being investigated by any government agency. All of which might be reasonable – if that’s what was actually going on…

First, it’s important to remember that Congress investigates a great many things every month, and a non-zero percentage of them are nothing more than political grandstanding. In this case, the committee doing the investigating is being led by an anti-abortion politician who is hoping to prove that Planned Parenthood is using Federal funds for abortions. They don’t, of course, because that would be grounds for the exact sort of governmental sanctions that the politician in our story wants to use to destroy the agency in the first place, but harassing a political adversary while playing to your own base is an American staple, and we shouldn’t be surprised to see it. It’s the Foundation’s part that is a bit odd…

As noted in the linked story, the new bylaw at the Komen Foundation is the work of their new Vice President for Public Policy – who happens to be an anti-abortion politician herself, and once ran for governor in Georgia on an anti-abortion platform. It’s also worth noting that this Vice President has publicly stated her opposition to Planned Parenthood, and that no other recipient of Foundation funds has ever been de-funded under this bylaw. One could easily believe that the entire point of these actions was to allow the Vice President of the Komen Foundation to vent her antipathy to Planned Parenthood and make it harder for the agency to provide health services to women who could not otherwise afford such care. But even if all of this is just a coincidence, it still doesn’t explain why the Komen Foundation has decided to flush its public perception in this fashion…

As I noted in several posts last year, the non-profit sector is all about relationships, and reputation is key to attracting donors and maintaining your relationship with them. The Komen foundation has invested massive amounts of time and effort in establishing itself as not only the biggest but also the best agency in the fight against breast cancer. Defending their copyrights, trademarks and images from use by smaller charities is occasionally bad for their image, but necessary to maintaining those assets. Developing a reputation as a haven for religious fundamentalists pushing a political agenda at the expense of poor women – in direct contradiction of the Foundation’s chartered goals – would be bad enough, but the attendant perception of race and class discrimination makes this seem like a willful attempt to destroy the Foundation’s brand perception. Or, perhaps, an attempt to destroy the Foundation outright...

Now, I know that some religious fundamentalists would prefer to see women die of cancer than have them exercise their right to reproductive freedom. And I realize that it would probably be easier for the Foundation to solicit donations from people who share those beliefs if it could distance itself from agencies like Planned Parenthood. But I find it hard to believe that it would sacrifice its public reputation just to achieve that advantage, and harder to believe that no one mentioned the consequences of flushing their hard-won brand image down the drain when this policy was first introduced…

Stop Insulting the Pond Scum

Last month in this space I commented on the dust-up between the American Cancer Society and the atheist groups that were claiming they hadn’t been allowed to donate money because they were/are atheists. At the time, I strongly implied that this was a publicity stunt on the part of the atheists, staged entirely for the purpose of gaining media attention (and name recognition) because people these days are only too willing to think the worst of any large organization if it allows them to feel superior to someone. At the time I felt (and suggested here) that this was reprehensible because it might influence people to withhold donations, not just from the ACS, but from cancer research in general, ultimately harming everyone who might ever suffer from cancer – a group which would, one assumes, include atheists as well as everybody else. As annoying as this might be, however, it pales before cases of people actually stealing money under the guise of raising funds for charity, such as the case that turned up in Washington State last week…

You can pick up the story from the local television station’s website if you want to, but the basic facts are that an outfit in Everett, Washington calling itself the Breast Cancer Prevention Fund has raised around $17 million over the last six years, of which they’ve spent $3.5 million on their stated services and another $3 million on overhead. The remaining $10,500,000 has all been paid to the telemarketing firm that does all of the fundraising for the non-profit – which would be bad enough, frankly, but the telemarketing company is owned by the same man who runs the non-profit group. Without auditing the telemarketing company’s books I can’t tell you for sure how much the owner is pocketing, but telemarketing is very high-margin business; all you need is a bunch of telephones and a group of people who are willing to make phone calls and read a script for minimum wage. But regardless of how much margin the telemarketing company is making, this so-called “charity” is utilizing just a hair over 20% of its donations to fulfill its actual mission – and that makes it a scam…

Now, as the linked article points out, there is no law against this type of operation in Washington State, and I’m not aware of any Federal law against running really crappy non-profit groups. Such a law would be impractical anyway, and I’d almost certainly have to turn in some of our former clients from the consulting company days if it did exist. But it’s unusual to find an operation where 80% of the donations are going to benefit the head of the agency, and it’s hard to see this as anything other than using people’s emotions about cancer research and screening to scam them out of money. It’s one of the lowest things you will ever see; calling such people scum is an insult to scum. What’s even worse, though, is that not only are these donations going into some crook’s home improvements instead of cancer research, but also this type of scam makes people less likely to donate to legitimate organizations like the ACS – or dozens of local agencies fighting the same fight…

Last month I suggested that it was self-serving of the atheists to pick a fight with the ACS just to get free publicity; those (obviously bogus) claims won’t really hurt the Society, but I resent anybody who draws support away from a worthwhile organization just to avoid having to pay their own PR costs. This week’s case illustrates how important accountability is in the non-profit sector. I’m not saying the ACS is staffed entirely by saints and angels (certainly they’ve never claimed any such thing), but they will make their utilization statistics available to you – and to anyone else who asks. So let me urge you once again to ask questions, look up the numbers, and make intelligent choices about who should get your money, and don’t let anyone else (even me) tell you where your donations should go…