“Over 73% of all donations raised (from the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge) are going to fundraising, overhead, executive salaries, and external donations.”
Bloggers on Thursday, August 28th, 2014 in blog posts
By now, there are very few Americans who haven’t heard of the “ALS Ice Bucket Challenge” — the social media-driven campaign during the summer of 2014 to dump ice water on your head as a way of raising awareness of the neuromuscular disease ALS and promoting donations to the ALS Association, which funds medical research and support programs for those who have the disease.
The effort has led to at least $94 million in donations to the ALS Association — a jolt of extra funding for a group that last year spent a comparatively modest $26 million.
But not everyone is happy about this development. A blog called politicalears.com posted an article stating that the Ice Bucket Challenge was a “fraud” because most of the money was being spent on administration and overhead. The unsigned post was picked up widely on social media feeds; that’s where PolitiFact readers noticed it. Several of them asked us to check it out, so we did.
The Aug. 28 blog post was headlined: “Ice bucket fraud: ALS Foundation admits that 73% of donations are not used for ALS research.”.
The post reprints a pie chart taken directly from the ALS Association’s website, showing the following breakdown of expenses:
Research: $7.2 million (27 percent)
Patient and community services: $5.1 million (19 percent)
Public and professional education: $8.5 million (32 percent)
Fundraising: $3.6 million (14 percent)
Administration: $1.9 million (7 percent)
Let’s start by noting some comparatively minor problems. First, the group in question is the ALS Association, not the “ALS Foundation,” as the blog post calls it. Second, the ALS Association hasn’t said anything to “admit” the claims asserted in the blog post, as the post’s headline says. In fact, they’ve posted a response to it here.
Now for the blog post’s biggest mistakes:
• “Over 73% of all donations raised are going to fundraising, overhead, executive salaries, and external donations.”
Not true. The 73 percent figure appears to come from subtracting everything except for the 27 percent that falls under “research.” The charitable way (no pun intended) of viewing the post’s error is that it misread the category headings.
If the post had simply said “research accounts for only 27 percent of the ALS Association’s budget,” that would be technically correct though still misleading, since the group’s mission statement includes several goals beyond directly sponsoring research. They include raising awareness, serving as a trusted source of information, providing patients with access to support services and advocating for increased funding for research.
Once you include “patient and community services” and “public and professional education” as legitimate spending to advance the group’s stated mission, the percentage spent on items supporting those goals rises to nearly 79 percent.
But the blog post actually exacerbated its error by specifically labeling 73 percent of the group’s spending as “fundraising, overhead, executive salaries and external donations.” That’s flat wrong.
We’ll add that if anyone wants to donate money to the association for research only, they can do that. “If a donor would like 100% of their donation to go to research, he/she can simply check a box on our online donation form here,” the association’s website says. “If a donor already donated and would like to redirect their donation, please email us at donations@alsa-national.org.”
Other groups that analyze charities have given the ALS Association high scores.
Charity Navigator, for instance, gave the ALS Association a score of four stars out of four for financial standards and transparency and accountability. The association is “Top Rated” by Charity Watch, is accredited by the Better Business Bureau and is a Guidestar Exchange gold participant.
Our ruling
The blog post said that “over 73 percent of all donations raised (from the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge) are going to fundraising, overhead, executive salaries, and external donations.”
In reality, nearly 79 percent of the ALS Association’s expenditures were for purposes that advance its stated mission. Fundraising, overhead and executive salaries account for no more than 21 percent.
We rate the claim Pants on Fire.
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