Mar 29 2010
Dialing For Golden (State) Dollars
We told you last week about the “Pennies for Charity” reports issued every year by the New York Attorney General. Since 2000, barely 7 percent of the money raised by HSUS’s Empire State telemarketers made it into Humane Society of the United States bank accounts. This is not exactly a paragon of efficiency, especially since less than one-half of one percent of that total actually gets to local pet shelters.
It’s a genuinely "inconvenient truth." But surely things must be better on the West Coast, right? Surely HSUS knows better than to scam the California progressives who make up the core of its membership, right?
Right???
Oh, dear. Here we go again.
California's Attorney General requires charities that raise money in the state to file public fundraising reports. And the Los Angeles Times has published a database on its website that readers can use to figure out the "net" return on telemarketers for those charities.
Here’s the bottom line: Between 1997 and 2006, HSUS got just 11.3 percent of the take when a professional "dialing for dollars" company reached out and touched someone on its behalf. Of the $8.6 million that HSUS’s fundraisers got from Californians, only $976,000 made it to HSUS.
The HSUS Wildlife Trust Fund is even worse, recording a net loss. The HSUS-affiliated Fund for Animals also recorded a net loss from telemarketers after it merged with HSUS in 2005.
Over at the Center for Consumer Freedom our team took note of the December Charity Rating Guide issued by the American Institute of Philanthropy (AIP). The independent charity watchdog gave both HSUS and the Fund for Animals an unimpressive "C-minus" grade.
And just last week AIP released its April/May Charity Rating Guide. Once again, HSUS and the Fund for Animals drew C-minus ratings.
If you had gotten those grades in school on two successive report cards, how long would your mom have grounded you?
AIP based its grade largely on the percentage of HSUS’s money that it spends on its programs (as little as 53 percent) and the amount of money it spends on fundraising (as much as 40 cents to generate every dollar of donations).
Is HSUS ever going to reform its factory fundraising practices? Wayne Pacelle is always saying he wants to curb “the most egregious abuses" in whatever sector of the economy he's targeting. How about his own?
Yes, Wayne, we know you get "4 star" ratings from Charity Navigator. But watch this space: It turns out one of the most wasteful charities in America can say that too. We'll tell you all about it tomorrow.
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Posted on 03/29/2010 at 01:38 PM by the HumaneWatch Team
The Best of HumaneWatch • Fundraising & Money • (6) CommentsComments
The only “charity” I can think of right off the top of my head which is a bigger scam than the H$U$ is all those “Sheriff’s (insert neato cause here) Fundraisers” I used to constantly get solicited for at dinner time…
If the NRA, (for instance), had the same track record as the H$U$ when it comes to “money solicited -vs- money actually sent to cause”, you can pretty much bet the FBI, the FTC, the IRS, and all those other alphabet soup agencies would be all over THEM like white on rice.
It must be nice to have lots of highly-placed Lefty celebrity and polititian friends to protect you from the consequences of your own lawbreaking, eh, Mr. Pacelle?
I do love the photo, but it’s hard to imagine The Great Pacelle doing grunt work.
So, doing the math on their California “Pledge Drive”:
If someone donated $1,000…
HSUS got $113 of that (11.3%),
and half of one percent means that local shelters got 56 1/2 cents.
Out of $1,000!
And people talk about GOVERNMENT inefficiency!!!
Why do we care? Unless, of course, we can wipe them out altogether.
But - HSUS doesn’t care about animals, and the last thing we want is them to suddenly reform and want to ‘get involved’. HSUS is a vegan animal rights organization, and is not in any way friendly to animals. The vegan goal is to eliminate all animal products and animals from human lives. All ... food, clothing, companionship, exhibition, working anÃmals. All.
So unless we can use their financial corruption to put an end to the lies and other moral corruption - who cares?
I am curious what do they have to gain by having their money funnel into a fundraising group?
Has anyone checked into who owns these fundraising companies? I suspect highly there are ties right back to Pacelle or maybe the mob?
There has to be a reason good ol’ Wayne is willing to let some dollars slip through his fingers.He is too smart a money manager to lose money fundraising
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Hi ..this is Wayne Pacelle.. won’t you please give me all of your money…? I need a new suit. LOL.Great photo.