Telemarketers

Bloomberg ran a really disturbing piece yesterday about telemarketers hired by charities (including some cancer charities) to raise funds for them. According to the article, the telemarketers (particularly a firm called InfoCision) took up to 80% of the funds raised for themselves, while telling donors that the opposite was true -- that the charity received 80%.

It's probably not a shock that a telemarketer was deceiving people to take their money -- they aren't generally thought of very highly -- but what was disturbing was that they did it all with the permission of the charities.

As the article explains, the telemarketer typically asked people to use their own money to send letters of solicitation to neighbors. These letters, because they came from a trustworthy neighbor, often result in donations, and with the donations, names on a list of potential future donors. The charities pay the telemarketer to run this program, knowing that the amount that comes in will usually be less than the amount that they pay to the telemarketer. This is what is called a "loss leader." But it's worth it to the charity because it increases the number of donors they have for the future.

The problem comes from what the telemarketers say to the donors who answer the phone. They sometimes refer to themselves as "volunteers," when they are in fact paid employees of the telemarketing firm. When asked, the solicitor sometimes says that the charity will get 80% of the money, when the opposite is true. They play it cute, and say "The overall percentage of donations is 80%," which is true: of ALL of the donations the charity receives, 80% goes to research, helping patients, or whatever the mission is. But that's not always the question being asked; people want to know how much of their actual, individual donation is going to the mission.

And the charities do know about this; the article shows documents with the charities' leaders signing off on the scripts that are read by the telemarketers over the phone.

Among the charities named in this investigation are the American Cancer Society and the American Institute for Cancer Research.

It bothers me. It's not necessarily illegal -- all of the necessary paperwork was been filed. But it bothers me.

At some point, it seems like a charity loses sight of the big picture, and cares more about something else than about its mission. I think this is what happened to Komen; now it's not enough to keep raising money, it's about raising more.  And I've already written enough about the American Cancer Society, which is caught up in a whole bunch of controversies about the way it spends money.

I don't know -- it's dis-heartening in some ways.

And I was going to be all happy this week, too...

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I see Dr. R tomorrow for a 4 month check-up. I'm not expecting anything dramatic. Look for results of the visit in the afternoon.