Controversy At Federal Government's Charity Drive

Dear Editor:

Thomas G. Bognanno, president of Community Health Charities of America, couldn't possibly be so misinformed about the Combined Federal Campaign as his quotes in your article make him appear to be (Controversy At Federal Government's Charity Drive).

http://philanthropy.com/free/update/2007/02/2007020701.htm

There was never a requirement that CFC charities have fund raising and administrative overhead of 25% or less, only that if overhead was higher than 25% the applicant charity had to summit a plan for eventually coming under 25%. Charities with 25% plus overhead were routinely admitted year after year -- including charity members of the CFC federations now complaining. Those federations weren't crying "accountability will suffer" when their own members with 25% plus overhead were asking to be included.

Mr. Bognanno and his colleagues claim CFC donors will be "confused" by the new 5-digit numbering system that is replacing the previous 4-digit system. The truth is that even those givers who give to the same charities each year look up their names and associated code numbers in the campaign's givers guide first. Why? Because the old code numbers were subject to change each year, and often did. (The new ones will be permanent). A couple of years ago OPM without advance notice changed the codes for every single member charity in the Christian Charities USA federation, one of the most popular federations in the CFC. There was no confusion and no complaint from givers whatsoever -- not a single phone call -- and the charities raised just as much money as they had raised before the change.

The complainers also allege that their charities "have no time to react" to the new numbers because they have already prepared their marketing materials for the Fall 2007 CFC. If they have done so they have no one to blame but themselves. The government gave several years advance warning about the coming change. Wait -- I take that back. The charities do have someone to blame -- Mr. Bognanno, who was supposed to be keeping his member charities up-to-date on CFC matters but apparently dropped the ball.

As for chastising the government for not being more "sensitive to what the world of philanthropy is saying," Mr. Bognanno surely cannot be suggesting he and his three fellow naysayers represent a majority or even a significant plurality of CFC charities, much less the entire nonprofit sector. There are twenty-seven national CFC federated groups. All of them had a full and fair opportunity to participate in the deliberations that eventually led to the new regulations. The majority of them support the government's actions.

I suspect that Mr. Bognanno and his colleague's real issues have nothing to do with campaign integrity or donor confusion. This all about competition. They've had less of it. They're going to get more of it. And they don't like it. One important fact they don't seem to comprehend, however, it that the CFC is not "their" campaign. The federal fund drive is an employee benefit, not a sinecure for select charities.

Even with the new regulations in place the CFC remains a very exclusive fund drive, far more so than, by comparison, many corporate workplace fund drives, where employees are free to designate their gifts to any charity in the country. In fact, it's ironic that Mr. Bognanno is fighting the government's plan to give its employees more freedom of choice in selecting other charities besides his own members. He and his members bitterly complain when local United Ways try to deny participation in corporate employee fund drives to only United Way charities. There's a word for that.