Planned Parenthood loses $2 mil in donations, plus almost $2 mil more
This is an incredible story.
On January 31 the Orange County Register ran an exposé on the whopping percentage commercial fundraisers bilk from nonprofits for telemarketing. In California, for instance, they get a ridiculous 63% cut of monies raised.
And buried in that story was this gem:
“I don’t blame the fundraisers,” [Doug] White [nonprofit ethics and fundraising consultant] continued. “They’re for-profit companies doing their job. I blame the nonprofits that use them over and over and over again.”
BIG NAMES
Some of those nonprofits are big-name national charities you’ve surely heard of - Mothers Against Drunk Driving, the American Civil Liberties Union, Medecins San Frontieres USA, Oxfam, Save the Children, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the U.S. Olympic Committee, the Natural Resources Defense Council - and those campaigns often wound up costing the charities money, rather than raising a single dime.
• One campaign for the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in New York had revenues of $2 million – but the nonprofit wound up losing $1.8 million nonetheless, for a return of minus 92.8 percent, according to data collected by the California attorney general.
Of all the examples of incompetent waste listed in the article, Planned Parenthood’s was the worst - simply hard to fathom. And don’t forget, this is the same organization we taxpayers gave $540 million to last year.
Hello, Planned Parenthood donors. Next time a telemarketer calls begging you to donate to PP, you’d be smart just to hang up. Your donations are more than blown. They cost PP coin. The way I see it, you would save PP money by not donating.
And I wonder how this particular commercial fundraiser was connected to PP? Whose telemarketing friend did PP hire?
UPDATE 2/28, 9:40a: Pro-Life Action League’s John Jansen has done an excellent investigative follow-up to my post, with additional information on just who the telemarketer is.
Jill Stanek is a nurse turned speaker, columnist and blogger, a national figure in the effort to protect both preborn and postborn innocent human life.
Makes we wonder why they do this, there must be some value to them, they can’t be that incompetent, can they? Happy to get people on their list, even at a cost?
This hurts my accounting brain. I had to read the whole article to get a clue how this is possible.
Assuming that there is no fraud or chicanery or kickbacks, it doesn’t seem possible to lose money on a telephone fundraiser. Unless…. there is an agreement that a “charity” (PP ain’t no charity!) pays the fundraiser a large fee up front, and then also shares a percentage of any funds collected. This means that the fundraiser must reach a certain level before the “charity” sees $1.
I am surprised that the PP fundraiser collected $2 mil. There must be more racists and eugenicists and humanity-loathing environmentalists than I know.
That’s why its very important to do your homework before giving any money to charity, as many of them have huge fundraising and administrative costs with little of the monies raised actually going to the cause. Komen is really bad. I prefer to give to small local charities with little or no fundraising costs. Charity begins at home!
I believe the benefit must be simply PR and the psychology of financial support translating into more profound ideological support. People suddenly feel more committed to a position for which we use our resources. Subtle cognitive dissonance.
Planned Parenthood has plenty of cash. They are rich. They don’t need or care about this sort of nickel-and-dime fundraising.
They didn’t lose $1.8 million on a fundraiser. They invested $1.8 million in advertising. PP would like to advertise, but their broadcasts on TV and radio always score protests.
So this “fundraiser” was really a telephone outreach. Thousands of homes got to hear about the wonderful health services PP provides to all those needy women who need Planned Parenthood’s generous help. Would we like to help PP help women? Cancer screenings, mammograms, healthcare education in our schools, reducing teen pregnancies, etc.. When pressed, 97% of PP’s services are not related to abortion.
The medium is the message: Paid fundraisers tell the public that PP is another loving, poor and worthwhile charity, just like all the rest. And pro-lifers don’t notice or raise an alarm.
Our enemy is subtle and devious. We should never giggle about how foolish they are. We must always ask ourselves, “How are they benefitting from this lie?”
And I wonder how this particular commercial fundraiser was connected to PP? Whose telemarketing friend did PP hire?
FYI, Jill, when you’re wondering about something, you can often use the internet to find answers to your questions. It’s called research. You might want to learn something about it. In this case, research would show that your source is guilty of inaccurate reporting, as blogs often are. According to the California Attorney General’s webpage, the group is Grassroots Campaigns Inc. It’s a canvassing organization, not a telemarketer.
Del – I think that’s the exact correct analysis. And it’s creepy. I was about to cheer – I’d far rather a hard-working telemarketing company made an honest buck than that the money went to Planned Parenthood. But you’re right, they just circumvented the rules on advertising abortion.
As an advocate for women and children, I have a few questions.
The first, while only 3% of PP funds go toward abortions (none of this is federal or public financed), they do provide a variety of health services to woman. The other 97% of funding goes toward providing woman with services vital to their health, often as the only available option because of financial difficulties many woman face. Why is this such a horrible thing?!
Secondly, I was initially impressed with the site stating that “Post-born” children are of equal concern. However, as I have scanned the articles, I cannot see that this “Concern” actually applies.
Around the world, 22,000 to 27,000 children, under the age of five, die everyday due to preventable causes.
Why is it more important to “Save” a fetus rather than a child who has taken their first breath? If breathing children are of concern, why is the majority (if not all) of the information on this site devoted to the “Pre-born”?
Elisabeth Noell–you have the fuzzy math figures mixed up. The common mis-statement we hear is “only 3% of PP’s services are abortion”, a number reached by deliberately inaccurate bookkeeping (for example, a young woman visits her local clinic once a month to pick up a birth control prescription, plus another few visits throughout the year for things like a pap smear and a couple pregnancy tests. That one girl is recorded as 15 separate “services”. Then if she comes back for an abortion, plus a pregnancy test before and an ultrasound and a handful of condoms after for a total of 19 services), that’s only a single “service”, meaning only 5% of her visits to that clinic was for abortion. See the logic there?)
PP doesn’t provide pre-natal care at all. Something like 90% of pregnant women who go to a PP clinic receive an abortion. Anyway, we fetus-lovers think even 3% is way too many dead babies. And there are other places women can go for bc pills and pap smears.
As for the tired pro-lifers-don’t-care-about-born-babies meme, that is so easily debunked I won’t even waste my time on it here. But I wonder, if the plight of children around the world dying from preventable illness and lack of clean water truly bothers you, and you’re not just throwing a statistic around to score points in a non-existent debate, then what are YOU personally doing to help those children? Why spend your time defending Planned Parenthood and berating those of us who think a child is still valuable before it breathes air, instead of using that passion to fundraise for a good charity?
@mrsJVR,
to state that you wont even try to address the lack of concern for the mentioned atrocious number of children dying daily, that could be used as a cop-out. I’m not saying it is or that’s what you are doing, but.
as to what I’m doing, I not only donate money and support a number of organizations that help these children and other at-risk families, I sponsor a child in africa myself. I have continued to do this even as my consulting income has drastically reduced so much that I’m trying to find another job.
Abortion is is not murder according to the Bible. If you wish I can post a long comment with the information to prove it.
Elisabeth Noell – how glad I am to see someone more pointing out what these people really are like. Unborn children are everything. Born children are nothing. Women are definitely nothing.
They claim to care for the post-born, but they do not. And their hate for Planned Parenthood clearly shows that living womens health means nothing to them.
It is a shame they have kidnapped the expression “pro life”, because their movement could not be further away from true pro life. Maybe if you do not count women as living. I guess I hit the right spot there…
pp is a “poor” charity? How poor can they be after government funding and fussing over by so many Hollywood stars?
Elisabeth, I agree that’s an atrocious number of children dying and that more ought to be done to stop it. I am impressed with your generosity as well. However, I don’t think you are being fair to pro-lifers when you attack them for focusing their efforts on unborn children. Just because there are other worthy causes out there doesn’t mean it’s wrong to dedicate a website to a single one. I’m sure you wouldn’t attack the American Cancer Society for putting priority on a single disease instead of broadening its focus to other societal ills (such as impoverished children dying preventable deaths). In fact, it would be suicidal to take one’s already limited resources and use them to fight every social injustice imaginable. He who fights everything fights nothing.
If you’re seriously wondering why pro-lifers are concerned about ending abortion (rather than trying to score rhetorical points because we can’t be everywhere at once), that would probably depend on the individual. Some pro-lifers have personal reasons (lost someone close to them, or participated in an abortion themselves). More generally, I think the pro-life cause is important because of the sheer number of human beings that are killed (in America, it’s more than any single cause of death), because the injustice is more widely accepted than any other (at least three-quarters of Americans believe it should be legally tolerated in some or all cases), and because one or both of the victim’s parents is almost always complicit in the act.
Not all pro-lifers are religious or base their arguments on the Bible. That includes commenters on this website. I do however know that while abortion isn’t mentioned directly in the Bible, it does state that humans are created in God’s image and that it’s wrong to inflict harm on an entity made in God’s image. Because there is outside evidence that the unborn are human, it follows that killing them is impermissible as well. There are some verses that abortion proponents use to challenge this contention, but they’re either taken out of context or don’t satisfy the pro-choicer’s burden of proof.