The Key to Internet Deals: Protecting a Charity’s ‘Brand’

To the Editor:

Your article “Ringing Up a New Way to Give” (December 16) raised many interesting issues for non-profit groups entering the world of charitable giving through for-profit Internet sites. However, the big issue was only touched on and is the one that non-profits should be most concerned about: protecting their brand.

At the Boys & Girls Clubs of America, we too have gone slowly in this business of providing use of our name and logo to the on-line shopping sites. Our rationale is simple: Would we give the use of our name to a retailer for a pittance? That’s exactly what most non-profits are doing today when they sign on to these sites. And in so doing, they are diluting their brand, and, more importantly, becoming a marketing arm for a for-profit company for almost nothing.

Let’s look at the iGive example cited in your article: $525,000 raised for 6,400 charities. The total may seem like a lot of money, but that works out to only $82 per charity. In other words, 6,400 charities have literally given away their brand name for absolutely no return.

I know there are ancillary benefits. For example, perhaps names can be gathered of those people who contribute (though most sites don’t provide them to the non-profit). But in most cases, our experience is that these sites are looking for our donors’ names. They want the e-mail addresses of our donors so they can sell them more stuff — and oh, by the way, we’ll send you a few pennies in return.

Internet companies are no different than other companies selling directly to the consumer or to those that walk in their stores. They’re looking for the competitive edge, and they’re smart enough to know non-profits need money and, therefore, sometimes don’t think about their brand name and identity. Non-profit brands, like for-profit brands, have value, and non-profits must begin to articulate this value to for-profit companies.

We’re approached an average of five times per week by companies looking to do cause-related business with us. Besides the safeguards we have built in to our system, we have the one big safeguard that separates the wheat from the chaff: We demand a high, guaranteed, minimum gift. We do the same for Internet companies to make sure we aren’t just giving away our good name and brand identity.

Kurt Aschermann
Senior Vice-President for Marketing and Communications
Boys & Girls Clubs of America
Atlanta

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To the Editor:

Shopping on line is one thing, but on-line donations through a “middle man” strikes me as altogether another. I question the ethics of a charity’s signing on with an on-line donation program that charges between 3 per cent and 5 per cent more than the basic charge-card fee — especially since the America Online Foundation will soon have its Helping.org site completely functional, and the foundation has promised no add-on fees.

We at the Lindsay Wildlife Museum will hold off putting an on-line donation “button” on our Web site until Helping.org or another group comes forward with a no-fee program. Meanwhile, we’re happy to have Amazon.com and all the rest, with buttons and links leading everywhere, and we’ve even signed on with e-Scrip so our donors and volunteers can easily benefit our programs when they do their grocery shopping.

We, too, wonder if it will all come to a crashing end once the retailers have more e-mail addresses than their marketing people can handle. But for now, even a little bit helps our cause.

Stephen Becker
Deputy Director for Development and External Affairs
Lindsay Wildlife Museum
Walnut Creek, Cal.