The Sierra Club -- Busted

The phone rang early this morning.  It was a young woman calling from the Sierra Club.

She started talking about "big polluters."  What she wanted was money.

Frequent readers of mine may recall an earlier post, "Phone Pests" on March 10, about the failure of the federal do-not-call list.  Long story short, hundreds of millions of phone numbers have been registered, including mine, but the numbers of phone pitches we receive have only increased over the years because almost no organizations pay any attention to the list.  I'm beginning to think the whole thing should be abandoned.

Apparently even the venerable Sierra Club is unwilling to stop bothering plainly uninterested people with phone pitches for donations.

Instead of engaging the young caller, I asked her to take my number off the Sierra Club call list immediately.  She said she would do so.

We'll see.



Fundraising Efficiency

I never felt comfortable giving money to people who called on the phone, but I swore off entirely several years ago after I read that one of those police benevolent associations had spent 72 percent of the money it collected on hiring phone solicitors.

Charity Navigator, which ranks the efficiency of charitable organizations, gives the Sierra Club high marks, noting that in 2012 it spent 8.5 percent of its annual income on fundraising. (The rate was closer to 10 percent in 2013, when the fundraising budget was $5.534 million against $55.361 million in contributions.)

I am suspicious of this figure.  My guess is that at least 40 percent of the money the Sierra Club raises from telephone solicitations is used to pay its telephone solicitors.

Although its financial report does not break out donations by sources, the group clearly receives large contributions from rich people and private foundations.

In 2011, Michael Bloomberg gave $50 million for anti-coal efforts.  Another man, David Gelbaum, was reported the same year to have given $100 million over a long period.  Large group funders are said to be the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Joy Foundation, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, the Turner Foundation and the David and Lucille Packard Foundation.  Last year the Sierra Club Foundation was the beneficiary of GET OUT, an Earth Month auction of celebrity meet-up opportunities on eBay.

There is nothing wrong with this, of course.  All  I am suggesting is that Sierra Club phone campaigns account for very little of its revenues, cost a lot to execute and, likely, irritate many of the people who are contacted.

The Sierra Club also pays people to go door-to-door soliciting donations.  (In the last city where I lived, it used to advertise job openings for "environmental activists" -- doorbell ringers -- in the local weekly newspaper.)

Its fundraisers still ring my doorbell several times each year.  They seem to be very nice young people who are opposed to pollution -- who isn't? -- but shockingly ignorant about environmental issues generally and recent Sierra Club initiatives in particular.

It surprises me that a prominent organization like the Sierra Club continues to conduct such inefficient and annoying campaigns.