
A charity that spends a sliver of its money on those it purports to serve - alphabettsy
https://publicintegrity.org/politics/iupa-leorf-police-union-charity-telemarketers/
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jeffdavis
Although this particular case is egregious, I'd like to point out that donors
should not be overly focused on a simplistic view of a charity's finances.

A charity that only moves money around should of course be pretty efficient
about it. But a charity that actually _does_ things faces the same kinds of
inefficiencies as any business.

For instance, The Nature Conservancy is a charity I like (I'm not necessarily
recommending them -- do your own research). About 2/3 of the raised funds go
to their actual programs, and the rest is administrative and fundraising.

However, they are one of the few large environmental charities that _actually
does stuff to help the environment, and attracts the expertise to do it well_.
The rest are lobbyists and money-shufflers, which I have little patience for
when it comes to charities.

In other words, I'm much more tolerant of inefficiency when actually doing
something. I think anyone who actually does things would agree that it's not
always efficient when observed from afar. But in reality it's much more
efficient to go straight to the people who can do stuff than what other
charities do: buy time with Congress, hoping that they will pass laws that
will either (a) move some money around in such a way that someone (perhaps
someone without much expertise) will do something; or (b) force someone to
stop doing something, hoping that they won't find a much worse thing to do
instead.

~~~
derefr
You would think that the "total efficiency rating" of a charity wouldn't
measure just the internal overhead of the company you're giving the money to,
but rather how much useful work comes out the other end once the job of
actually helping someone has been subcontracted out N times. In such a view, a
money-shuffler is clearly less efficient, because in the end they have to give
the money to someone else, so they can only add overhead on top of whatever
efficiency that someone-else already has.

~~~
jeffdavis
What is the "total efficiency" of a charity that mainly does lobbying and
awareness, and no actual work ever happens?

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Multiplayer
In high school I actually worked at one of these organizations. It was the
typical boiler room you might imagine: Grubby, dirty office space in a
forgotten retail center with dingy cubicles consisting of a beat up desk, a
phone and a stack of 3x5 cards to call. We were taught to do just about
everything we could to convey that _we_ were active duty officers calling for
donations, without actually saying that. Middle class citizens were all too
often happy to donate or, in our case, buy tickets to what I assume was a non-
existent fund raiser because of who they assumed we were. The whole system
felt 100% fraudulent from top to bottom.

I lasted about 3 months and moved onto telephone sales for a major retailer.
Back then if you had a deep voice you could make way better money than your
friends working at fast food, etc.

I can recommend telephone cold calling as a means for getting an extremely
harsh but powerful lesson in reading people via voice tone very very quickly.
:)

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Havoc
Why deep voice?

~~~
anigbrowl
Many people perceive a deep, masculine voice as authoritative. It's just the
same way a big musclebound guy will be taken more seriously than a physically
frail person saying the same thing. We haven't evolved as much as we like to
imagine.

~~~
nkurz
You're near Oakland, right? Have you seen the movie Sorry to Bother You? If
not, I think you might enjoy it. It's an Oakland focused telemarketing spoof,
and one of the better things I saw last year:
[https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/sorry_to_bother_you_2018](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/sorry_to_bother_you_2018).
It's not perfect, but it's definitely original.

~~~
anigbrowl
I've seen it, but thanks for the reminder to give it another viewing.

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jc01480
This same scheme applies to any “charity” that does not overtly state 100% of
their proceeds are donated. And it’s not limited to law enforcement
associations. Those commercials you see on TV about starving children, abused
animals, suffering refugees, etc. are all complicit. What really happens:
executive level and staff salaries are set at the market level for the
association. All donations go to cover these “costs” throughout the year.
Whatever is left over from these “costs” actually gets donated to their target
group. The donations usually equal about 10% or less of their received funds.
Correlate the executives that run these to other donation groups and you’ll
see a pattern of people running them. Unless 100% of the proceeds go toward
the target group is clearly communicated, all you’re doing is paying someone’s
salary to run a feel-good effort that actually contributes very little to
their target. And I’m a cop. Do your research.

~~~
bhouston
It strikes me as incredibly psychopathic on the part of the operators to run
charity scams like this. How do they justify it to themselves?

Do other countries suffer similarly with fake self-serving charities like the
US does?

~~~
jacquesm
> How do they justify it to themselves?

By looking at their bank accounts.

> Do other countries suffer similarly with fake self-serving charities like
> the US does?

Not quite, robocalling is much less common, as are easy ways to figure out who
is a likely donor.

A very good effort in this domain is Givewell, their own transparency report
is a good example of how it should be done and their information is usually of
very high quality:

[https://www.givewell.org/](https://www.givewell.org/)

[https://www.givewell.org/about/our-
mistakes](https://www.givewell.org/about/our-mistakes)

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psim1
See also, Fraternal Order of Police. A quick Google search returns many
results of the low quality of fundraising by this organization, which is not
rated by charitynavigator because it's actually not a 501(c)(3).

~~~
FireBeyond
In many cases, the FOP is really "give us money to get a sticker for your car
that means some of our members might go more leniently on you".

See also: companies on eBay selling counterfeit stickers.

See also: the FOP designing stickers almost like vehicle tabs, with color
coding so they can see that you're "paid up", sorry, "have donated".

~~~
chihuahua
In Washington state you can even get special license plates that say "law
enforcement memorial" for an annual fee, presumably for the same purpose. I
was tempted to get these for my car+motorcycle but then I remembered I haven't
gotten pulled over in 20 years so I probably don't need it.

~~~
bmarquez
In California I occasionally see "11-99 foundation" license plates, for $2500
any non-felon can get one and hope the California Highway Patrol will go easy
on them.

~~~
dresstotheleft
Had to look up the foundation. Why would you need to do a background check to
donate? Seems counter productive.

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taneq
An ex once worked for a "charity" like this. The person running the
"nonprofit" drove a very nice car, but as far as we could tell the income
(mostly derived from fooling retirees into increasing their recurring
donations) went largely to perpetuating the owner's paycheck with a small
amount diverted to printing pamphlets.

~~~
FireBeyond
Australia used to have (still might, I moved to the US in 2006) a scheme
called "work for the dole" ("dole" being slang for unemployment benefits).

Be unemployed long enough and you had to do a work program, or learning
scheme. I was laid off as a web developer during the first dot com crash. And
ended up in one of these - a computer "web" course, run at a church, that'd
teach people HTML, etc. One, I figured it'd be easy for me, and two, I could
even mentor people.

It was a shit show. 10 people, 5 donated computers (which were old, and didn't
have fresh installs, so lots of browser bar removals, etc., etc.). Only one
copy of Dreamweaver. Lots of screwing around.

I'm thinking to myself, I know the government pays people to come up with
these schemes and can make themselves a supplier - provide a program,
outcomes, and get paid per student to teach them.

Why then the donated old computers, the church hall, and the shared copy of
Dreamweaver? The second morning, the "tutor" told us the owners were going to
come by and check on things.

It was two ladies in their 50s. They had near zero familiarity with computers
and very little desire to know / learn anything...

... probably because they were too busy discussing the features of their two
brand new company cars, Jaguars, that they'd just picked up. Not leased, just
purchased outright. With the funds that were presumably to provide computers
and educational materials.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
>I'm thinking to myself, I know the government pays people to come up with
these schemes and can make themselves a supplier - provide a program,
outcomes, and get paid per student to teach them.

Unemployment/retraining and social services type programs are child's play
when it comes to state sanctioned wastes of money. The real money is in the
programs judges force people to attend. The people who are really smart (or
devious, depending on your viewpoint) make up programs that sound like they
screwing people who deserve to be screwed (if you ask the people who take
everything at face value) out of their money but are really a much broader
dragnet. Traffic school and anything having to do with DUI are the best
examples that come to mind but all sorts of "failure to respect the rules set
by the government" civil infraction and misdemeanors have accompanying
privately run programs that the judges will require people to attend in lieu
of jail time or longer probation (both of which cost the state money). These
programs can fly under the radar basically forever because a large chunk of
the population will turn a blind eye to anything bad as long as you can do
some mental gymnastics and make it seem like the bad thing is happening to
"criminals".

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Spooky23
There is a whole gaggle of these outfits.

In New York, they always have aggressive guys with heavy Long Island accents.
The schtick always puzzled me, as I live upstate and the accent sounds like
nails on a chalkboard up here.

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coldcode
Always check the percentage of money donated/used for the purpose of a charity
vs how much is spent on overhead/fundraising (using public sources not the
charity). Ideally 90% should go to the purpose and no more than 10% to the
other. It's sad how many are inverted.

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stevenking86
I use givewell ( [https://www.givewell.org/](https://www.givewell.org/) ) out
of fear of this kind of thing. I have no affiliation with them but I do
recommend them due to the way they evaluate charities.

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Luc
To get the most bang for your buck:
[https://www.givewell.org/](https://www.givewell.org/)

~~~
jc01480
Nice find! Thanks! Happy holidays to you!

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dlhavema
Seems like it's too easy to setup a "charity" with little to no oversight.
Just my outside opinion with little knowledge of the process or follow up
done. This kinda reminds me of the Goodwill reports that came out bashing
them...

~~~
lotsofpulp
The whole charity tax exemption concept is just a big loophole, and I can’t
imagine it was created unintentionally. Obviously there is not sufficient
manpower for enforcement of the rules, not to mention it’s impossible to make
the rules without so much room for plausible deniability that it wouldn’t make
a difference anyway.

~~~
iicc
Ikea

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ken
I generally assume most charities are bogus until and unless I specifically
research it and discover otherwise.

For example, the Seattle Marathon has long claimed to help UW medicine, and
then it turned out that less than 1% of their money (and none of the entry
fees) were going there.

[https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/just-1-of-
seattle-...](https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/just-1-of-seattle-
marathon-money-goes-to-charity/)

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watertom
I consider almost all charities to be scams, it's an easy way for a few people
to make a lot of money and everyone else to get shafted.

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xfitm3
The Susan G. Komen breast cancer organization gives only 20% of their
donations to cancer research and pays their CEO $684,000 per year.

~~~
amanaplanacanal
Their business seems to be “raising awareness”, as if there are people out
there that are still unaware of breast cancer.

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pkaye
I never donate to any charity that asks for donations on a phone call. I ask
them to email or mail me the information to consider. Furthermore even if it
is a charity I know about, I rather donate directly on their website to make
sure middlemen don't take their cut.

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cjbenedikt
Example: American Red Cross raised $500 mio for Haiti, built 13 (!) houses,
didn't know where money went!

