The Atlantic has a good comment from one of their writers about the administrative overhead thing. SGK spends 20% and PP spends 16% on overhead. She also makes a good point that the people coming out of the woodwork to complain about the overhead spending at SGK probably aren’t going to have a problem with PP’s 16%, which is very close to SGK’s. The comment also makes a good point that people are potentially overly concerned with how much of a charity’s budget is overhead. If you have all your donors asking that the money you donate goes to specific programs how do you pay a staff to maintain everything? Plus, as the comment also notes, there isn’t a good one-size-fits-all argument to be made for overhead percentage since different organizations have different environments they are operating in which will cause valid fluctuations in overhead percentage.
If this was the first time Komen had ever made people angry, it would probably be a different story. But when you combine this with their lawsuits against smaller charities and to a lesser extent the ubiquitous pink stuff, it gives a more negative impression of the organization. Breast cancer screenings are very relevant to what Komen does, and even if “PR is tough,” you might think this is the kind of thing that warrants a real explanation and not what they actually did- which was use an investigation that was politically motivated in the first place to make a decision that looks equally political.
Has anyone said otherwise? (Hint: no.)
It appears they are dumping an organization they’ve supported for years and whose goals are related to their own because they think they’ll get more money by selling them out. I don’t think that’s the kind of behavior a lot of people want to see from a charity.
I’ve always thought of “recreational outrage” as being outrage about something that both doesn’t affect you and about which you can do nothing. Expressing dismay over the actions of a charity one has supported in the past and making plans to change one’s charitable giving in the future based on those actions strikes me as the opposite of recreational outrage. People give to charities based on how much they agree with the charity’s purpose. When they find that that purpose has changed, is not what they thought, or discriminates in ways they don’t approve, they get pissed off. Rightfully so, in my opinion. No pro-choice donor wants to feel like their charitable contributions to a women’s health organization are being used to promote a pro-life agenda at the potential expense of underprivileged women’s health.
To make this just a little more pointed - they’re dumping an organziation they’ve supported by years because a vocal few have convinced them they need to in order to get more money.
The rest of us get to decide what to do with our money too and I really hope that the outcome of this is that other cancer charities benefit and SGK learns that bending to the vocal minority is actually not a good idea. Princess Margaret Hospitalin Canada is getting extra money from me this year - the money I used to give to the Run for the Cure.
This has only a little to do with charity and a lot to do with a group of people trying to force the world into behaving the way they want them to behave. SGK falling apart as a charity over this would be sad but cancer does get a disproportionate amount of research funding so I don’t think that standing up for our right to not be run over by the religious right is all that risky for the world in general.
Nicely said.
I’m angry because I feel duped and because I’m sick and tired of seeing PP used as some whipping boy in a pro-life agenda. PP is an honorable organization that help maintain the lives of real women every day. To me this is less about SGK and more about yet another spurious attack on PP>
It seems the backlash is closer to 80-1 against SGK’s decision on social media networking sites.
Well put. I can deal with incidental policies that are not 100% aligned with my POV but this particular event seems very deliberate and specifically targeted.
Also, as time has gone by I must confess I too was starting to feel a little at odds with the aura surrounding SGK/RFTC as if they were THE divinely annointed women’s cancer entity and may the Mother of Og help you if you weren’t eager to pink-ribbon everything, from airliners to soda cans to our State Capitol building and if anyone else tried to “[verb] for the cure” out came the cease and desist letters.
Apparently, they’ve thought better of their decision:
Some fun facts about SGK posted by someone on SGK’s fb page:
ONLY 17% of SGK donations go to research." According to opensecrets.org, the Komen Foundation spent $740,000 in lobbying expenditures in 2011.
In 1999, 2000 and 2001, they lobbied against the so-called “Patients’Bill of Rights”, and they lobbied against the “Affordable Care Act”. They lobbied the FDA to allow Tamoxifen as a drug to " prevent" breast cancer, even though it was linked to uterine cancer and no one else thought it was a good idea - except for the drug company who is one of their primary donors, and for Avastin, which didn’t work, had been dropped by every other country for the purpose of treating breast cancer and cost about $90,000 per year, for the same reason.
Believe it or not, they also lobbied against the “Breast & Cervical Cancer Prevention & Treatment Act”. One person working to pass the bill called a Rep.'s office and, "Shocked, I asked her who was opposing it. She told me that Komen opposed the bill. When I asked her why, she explained that Komen felt that treatment for uninsured breast cancer patients should be funded through private donations, like the pink ribbon race.
One Senate staffer “recalls the Komen Foundation as one of his biggest clients at
Fleishman-Hillard, the sixth largest PR firm in the world.”
“Right now, they’re opposing the Accelerating the End of Breast Cancer Act - a bill that will create an oversight panel to focus research funding on a streamlined agenda to create a breast cancer vaccine and to find a way to stop breast cancer metastasis”. Komen doesn’t seem to want to cure breast cancer, they want to OWN it. Komen is all about testing, not curing or treating, as evidenced by their lobbying and “education” efforts. “Remember, mammograms don’t cure or prevent breast cancer, access to affordable high quality health care does.”
What is also important is what they didn’t lobby on - like when their good friend Occidental, “successfully lobbied in 2000 and 2001 for looser EPA air, water and chemical regulations at the same time government researchers reported auto and industrial emissions caused cancer”, and a subsequent Congressional bill, the Breast Cancer and Environmental Research Act". Nice."
Never underestimate the powerof pissed-off women and their allies.
I just wanted to add to this that, since Charity Navigator and other non-profit rating sites use totally self-reported numbers, Komen can declare that $740,000 to be “program expenses” and CN will go along with that. So can their PR expenses because they can claim that public relations fits with their “breast cancer awareness” mission…I’ll tell you in my non-profit experience that most organizations would not call lobbying and PR expenditures “mission-critical.”
The situation with Avastin, at least, is more complicated than that. Avastin doesn’t help most women with breast cancer, but there are some women who find it works when nothing else does. The ideal solution would be finding out who it works for so nobody else takes it to no effect, but that’s difficult. Meanwhile some insurers won’t pay for Avastin in breast cancer because the approval was withdrawn.
That’s about as bad a PR release as you’ll ever see: it angers the pro-life crowd by restoring the grant to Planned Parenthood, and it keeps the pro-choice crowd unhappy by continuing to deny the decision had anything to do with politics, plus by underwhelmingly saying that PP and other organizations are “eligible to apply for future grants” (well of course they are, but why reiterate that here? PR is as much about what you don’t say as what you do say.) And if that weren’t enough, Komen has to admit that they have to “refocus attention on (their) mission”…about as close as they’ll ever come to admitting that, yes, this is an organization that is going off the rails. It’s not going to make anybody even the slightest bit happy, IMHO.
Right, now they’ve managed to piss off both sides of the abortion debate. Nice going ladies!
I realize that this was a long way back in the thread, but I just thought that I would note that I signed up for a monthly recurrent donation about a year ago, and I’ve gotten only one “Thank you” email and two snail-mail requests around Christmas. Perhaps they’ve gotten better about this.
While I’m glad they backed down, I am now wary of the organization’s leaders and their mission. The newly hired people who probably spurred this decision in the first place are rabid anti-abortion nutters, and those people never know when to give up. As long as they work for SGK, this type of thing is ready to happen all over again at the drop of a hat. Next time, people might not be so tuned in.
It does have one positive result though. This situation has shined a new light on what PP does and SGK so that they can’t hide behind their “We’re against breast cancer” face. Publicity invites scrutiny and they better damn well know that they’ll be under a microscope for the foreseeable future
Yep, I’ve been watching the FB page. They’ve really opened a can of worms that can’t be closed. There is so much scrutiny of them and their practices that no pro-choicer out there is now going to keep supporting them and all the anti-choicers out there are screaming to get their money back that they donated yesterday. It’s pretty amusing to watch.
Hopefully this is the wave of the future. The People respond when they are getting screwed over. Let those who fuck us fear our wrath!! 
I can’t access that link, so here is the New York Times article.
I agree. I think this was so ham-handed and so poorly handled that they are going to lose a lot of support no matter what. I’d be surprised if there wasn’t a significant contraction in their organization over the next year.