August 12, 1999 | Read Time: 4 minutes
Last month’s ruckus in Congress over the disclosure that dozens of public-television stations had exchanged their donor
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lists with both major political parties shows how little some lawmakers know about how charities raise funds — or that the lawmakers simply are looking for any excuse to end government subsidies to public broadcasting.
Non-profit organizations rent or exchange the names of their donors, members, or supporters all the time. It is a common and acceptable practice. The fact that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting receives funds directly from Congress should not disqualify it or any station that receives funds from it from swapping donor lists, even with political parties.
The donor lists are valuable because people with certain characteristics who give to one organization are likely to give to another. In this case, the demographics of donors to public television — highly educated, high-income, more likely than most to vote — make them attractive to political parties. As public broadcasting struggles to survive, stations cannot afford to turn down any legitimate opportunity to increase their flow of donations.
The actions of the public stations in this case appear to be completely legitimate, though not necessarily good thinking. The Internal Revenue Service allows charities to rent or exchange their lists with political groups or candidates, provided that the charities give all political groups or candidates a reasonable opportunity to use the lists, and no group or candidate is given special treatment. No one in this case is charging favoritism.
Nonetheless, several lawmakers who have long been committed to ending public broadcasting have seized on the flap to grab headlines and to push for further cutbacks in — if not the elimination of — government support for public broadcasting. Their method is to make it seem as if the stations are using political-party donor lists to improperly influence legislation. But as any fund raiser can testify, the trades were a way to generate ancillary income and, perhaps, to cultivate good will with politicians.
But the name-swapping was definitely dumb judgment on the part of station executives. Indeed, given the current political climate — and the fact that in the world of politics, perception is always more important than legitimacy — it is hard to understand how fund raisers could have approved those transactions.
After dithering for two weeks, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting — with the horses safely out — locked the barn doors. The Board of Directors banned all list transactions involving political entities and issued a tough new standard on list privacy that requires that donors to stations that receive C.P.B. funds be given the option to remove their names from lists that are rented or exchanged. By doing so, the board members hoped to appease their enemies on the Hill — a doubtful strategy on two counts: Their enemies are unlikely to be appeased, and banning list exchanges with political parties is, on principle, wrong-headed.
In any event, C.P.B. is right — though late — to be concerned about the ethics of privacy. The ethical test is simple: Do the donors have a clearly stated right — like a check-off box on the reply card or envelope — to prevent their names from being traded? That question should apply not only to political trades, but to all list trades or rentals with any group.
Some stations clearly did not offer such an option, and that was wrong. Still, as most fund raisers have learned, even when donors are given the option of removing their names from list exchanges, the overwhelming majority do not exercise it.
Some public-broadcasting stations go further and never exchange their donors’ names with anyone. Many other charities act the same way. But such high-mindedness is becoming rarer because non-profit groups need the income.
After suitable acts of contrition, this brouhaha is more than likely to quiet down, with little permanent effect other than the overreaction by C.P.B. But the privacy issue is certain to become even more important as more and more charities begin to figure out how to use the Internet to lure donors and gather easily retrievable digital information about them.
Once again, the hard-core enemies of public broadcasting have the upper hand, at least for now. The only difference this time around was that it wasn’t what public broadcasting did on the air. It’s what happened behind the scenes.
Henry Goldstein, president of the Oram Group, in New York, is a regular contributor to these pages. His e-mail address is hankus@juno.com.
