Consultant’s ‘Golden Rules’ for Charities Vex Competitors

Patrick Maguire, a fund-raising consultant in Corte Madera, Calif., has some key “golden rules” for

the charities he advises that seek donations through the federal government’s Combined Federal Campaign charity drive.

Charities should “focus on the marketing tools you already have” through three concepts, says advice provided by his company, Maguire/Maguire Inc. They are:

The charity’s name. Charities must have “a name that stops a donor and gets the attention immediately so that he or she knows you support a specific cause,” says Maguire/Maguire. If a charity has a name that does not already do this, it should consider setting up a “doing business as,” or DBA, organization with a more descriptive name to use in the government drive, says Maguire/Maguire in several of its publications.

Statement of purpose. The federal drive allows each charity listed in its annual campaign catalog of eligible organizations to write a 25-word statement that describes its mission. Mr. Maguire says his research shows that 80 percent of donors in the federal campaign rely on the catalog for causes to support when making their giving decisions. “Well-crafted 25-word statements, written more as advertising copy than mission statements, will increase your CFC income substantially,” says a Maguire/Maguire publication.

“We tell charities, ‘Paint the picture of the result of what you do, don’t give a description of how you got there,’” says Mr. Maguire. “In other words, don’t say, ‘We train doctors to go to third-world countries to perform operations.’ Say, ‘Thanks to you, a child will see.’”

Mr. Maguire adds: “Charities are often too close to their programs to understand this concept, and their program people usually wind up writing these things. And they use jargon. We can’t always convince charities that donors don’t really want to know that they were ‘founded in 1892′ — that just wastes three perfectly good words out of 25 needed to sell somebody.”

Overhead. A donor trying to decide between two similar charities will almost always choose the one with the lower overhead, says Maguire/Maguire. “If you don’t already have a lower overhead, work on lowering it,” the company advises.

Summing up his “golden rule” for charities, Mr. Maguire says his philosophy is: “Name stops, statement sells, overhead closes.”

‘Best of the CFC’

Another Maguire fund-raising approach — one that has riled competitors — is a booklet and Web site that Mr. Maguire’s company helps produce each year that are called “The Best of the CFC.”

The booklet contains advertisements for Mr. Maguire’s client federations and their charity members that the groups pay publishing companies to run and for which Maguire/Maguire receives a commission. It is distributed in editions of trade newspapers, such as Army Times and Federal Times, that are read by members of the military and civilian federal employees.

In 2002, several competitors of Mr. Maguire’s client federations asked the federal government to review the Best of the CFC Web site, saying that the site may have misled donors by appearing to be an official publication of the government or the Combined Federal Campaign.

In particular, they said they were bothered that the Web site used the government drive’s name and logo and did not contain what they considered to be a sufficient disclaimer that it was not an official publication.

Federal regulations require “truthful and non-deceptive” promotions by organizations that participate in the Combined Federal Campaign.

Audits by the inspector general of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, which oversees the Combined Federal Campaign, concluded in 2004 that the disclaimer was sufficient and that no rules were broken.

However, the audit reports said that some federal officials had concerns that portions of the Best of the CFC Web site might not be clear or consistent with those officials’ view of “how donors should be approached,” and that the government needed to develop policies regarding the use of the name Combined Federal Campaign.

Subsequently, the Office of Personnel Management said that because the audits did not find a violation of rules, it decided not to issue policy guidelines to charities. “OPM believes the CFC regulations are adequate, in this regard, to protect the integrity of the CFC,” said Michael W. Orenstein, a government spokesman, in an e-mail message.

Mr. Maguire says federal workers appreciate his “easy-to-read advertising supplement” as a way to focus on causes they want to support. “It was the use of the word ‘best’ that fried these other federations,” says Mr. Maguire. “The publication made them so angry because they didn’t think of it themselves.”