January 10, 2008More professional solicitors, same old patternAfter Roanoke Times reporter Amanda Codispoti showed me a database a few months ago of contracts between professional solicitors and public safety-related charities that revealed the huge portion of funds the solicitors keep, I got curious. Is it only rescue squads and volunteer fire departments who are cutting these kinds of deals? It's not. We now have available in the DataSphere a database of over 4,000 contracts between solicitors and charities of all kinds and sizes, running from January 2000 to June 2007, and the pattern is the same. These contracts raised nearly $2.1 billion, according to the data from the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, which keeps the tallies. The solicitors kept about $1 billion of it. It didn't matter much if the charity was a local Civitan Club or UNICEF. |
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Comments
[January 10, 2008 3:31 PM]
Bill : →http://www.piava.wordpress.comI don't find the database for the contributions. The link here goes to the story, but I don't see link to acutal database. Is there one?
[January 10, 2008 4:11 PM]
Matt : →http://www.roanoke.com/datasphere/Bill, others. I did have a quirky link on the DataSphere page itself, but all's straight now. If you go to http://www.roanoke.com/data/viewdata.aspx?wdid=63&cid=14, you can see the database. You may have to scroll down a bit to see the search menus, though.
[January 11, 2008 9:03 AM]
Ed S.Wow, what a racket.
Matt, check the data for year 2007, all charities. Sort by solicitor and look for "Facter Direct" (something like that). Do you know if this data is accurate? -20% and -40%? Yikes.
Looks like soliciting is a pretty lucrative business. What's more, I wonder how much of the contributor's personal data they are keeping?!
[January 11, 2008 9:14 AM]
MattThe sort by solicitor is really interesting. Some very obvious patterns emerge in terms of how much they take. One group, Community Support Services Inc., consistently takes a smaller, while still significant cut.
The negatives are curious, too. Since these are national organizations, I wonder if the number could be a negative in Virginia in the context of overall positives nationwide.
I also wonder how these contracts get started. In how many instances is it the solicitor who approaches the charity and says, "Let us use your name, you do none of the work, and at the end of the year we'll give you 25 percent." To a small group with no fundraising mechanism, like a rescue squad ladies auxilliary, that must look like easy money -- if it actually works that way.
[January 11, 2008 7:53 PM]
Ed S.Matt, that's one of the things I like about these things in the Datablog. Like you said, it may not be as much fundraising for the org as it is profiteering by the company, with the charity being a "side-effect". While I have no problems with someone finding a way to make a profit, if I'm donating my money, I want it to go directly to the org.
That's why I never donate over the phone or to door-to-door solicitors now. I'll give directly to the org through an established, direct means.