Fundraisers pocket nearly half of charity donations
By Teri Sforza, Orange County Register
Commercial fundraisers – the middlemen who hit you up for charitable donations by phone, mail and outside the supermarket – often pocket a big chunk of the dough. And it’s only growing: They extracted a stunning 90 percent more money from do-gooders in 2014 as they did in 2013, according to the California Attorney General’s latest numbers.
These often for-profit firms raked in $687.7 million from well-meaning Californians last year. They gave a bit more than half of it to charities – $371.9 million – and kept $315.8 million for themselves.
Most kind-hearted donors have no idea that so much of their donation gets waylaid, and some in the fundraising business have harsh words for the charities that employ them.
Choose your charity wisely. Even once you get past the fudraisers, many of the charities themselves have outrageous expense ratios. CEOs can make millions in total compensation. Charity Watch can give info on a lot of that, but they don’t include a lot of faith based charities.
Accurate story, and true comments by Dogula! To put it simply, there are often many who are profiting quite well from a ‘non-profit’. Or put another way, claiming something is a non-profit is frequently a misnomer, (even the IRS says they can claim it), and thus misleading.
Charity Navigator is also a good site. The salary of a CEO of a non-profit is not as important. A foundation that has $50 million in annual donations is really a large corporation. What is important is what % goes to programs and what % is administration cost (which includes CEO salary). The better larger non-profits keep their admin cost below 15% and even below 12%.
Rick
Thank you, Kae, for publishing this. People need to be made aware of where their money is going. Charity Watch is my favorite….I’ve used it for years.
Well said everybody and everybody agrees. You can’t tell a book by its cover and bad people take advantage of that by fleecing good people.