Imagine the following…

After talking with a friend who says great things about your organization, I hop on your website – and I’m impressed. 

Based on this friend’s referral and my bit of online homework, I pull out my credit card and donate $50. 

Question: Should you accept my gift?

Your response: What? Are you serious? Of course we’ll accept your gift!

My follow-up question: Do you know how I got the money? And does that matter?

This path is clear – until it isn’t

Within fundraising circles, the conversation about “dirty money” has been going on forever. The argument goes like this: If the money has been generated from activities that run counter to your mission, you shouldn’t accept it. For example,

• Environmental groups shouldn’t take donations from industrial polluters.
• Health promotion organizations shouldn’t accept gifts from those who produce tobacco products or junk food.
• Immigrant rights advocates shouldn’t take contributions from employers who abuse immigrant labor. 

Etc. On the surface, this makes a certain amount of sense – nobody wants to look like a hypocrite – but once you dive a little deeper, things get complicated.

Examples, micro and macro

Let’s start with my fifty bucks. Given that I’m a consultant working with all sorts of lovely nonprofits, my money looks pretty clean – unless I cheated my clients (I didn’t).

But maybe that gift came from my retirement fund … and how is that invested? I could be earning money from firearms or fossil fuels (I’m not), but how would you know? And does that matter to you? 

That’s the micro example. Here’s the macro: grantmaking foundations. First, let’s acknowledge that many brand-name foundations were originally funded through industrial fortunes and corporate activities that many people find objectionable: everything from natural resource extraction to discriminatory lending to union-busting.

In response, activists have been pushing philanthropists to clean up their investments, dating back to the South Africa divestment efforts of the 1980s and continuing to today’s climate justice movement. 

So … when you receive a grant from your local family foundation, do you know how the money was earned? Clean, dirty, or ambiguous? Again, does that matter to you?

“The vomit test”

In Fundraising for Social Change, Eighth Edition, co-written with Stan Yogi, Kim Klein tells an instructive story about the Playboy Corporation, publisher of Playboy magazine:

Feminists like myself found it exploitative and demeaning to women, but also had a grudging respect for Hugh Hefner (1926-2017), who was a strong and generous supporter of civil liberties and reproductive rights groups. 

In the 1970s and 1980s, the corporation offered free, high-quality printing… Any nonprofit simply had to place the statement, “Printing donated by the Playboy Corporation,” along with a small image of the Playboy Bunny logo somewhere on the printed piece.

The Coalition [for the Medical Rights of Women] … had occasionally accepted Playboy’s terms to get some of this printing. As a collective, we argued back and forth about whether to continue taking the free printing …

Late one night, after yet another such go-around, one person finally said, “I don’t know whether it is right or wrong to take this money. All I know is that taking Playboy’s money or its free printing makes we want to vomit.”

From then on … we applied the “vomit test.” If a person who was close to the organization – staff or board member, volunteer, longtime friend – said, “Taking money from such and such would make me want to vomit,” that person’s contributions to the group were considered more important than the money.

Kim – a skilled, smart fundraiser with more than 40 years in the field – concludes the story this way: “I have never found a more rational approach to the question, ‘How would it make us feel to accept money from a source whose practices we do not condone?’”

How does it feel – and how does it smell?

In addressing this conundrum, I appreciate how Kim centers the experience and feelings of those inside the organization: staff, board, volunteers, and “longtime friends.” For your group, consider a few additional audiences – partners, supporters, and other members of your constituency, however you define it – and how they might feel.

In addition to “the vomit test,” let me suggest “the smell test.” When the gift goes public, will people beyond your inner circle question your ethics or commitment to your mission? Stating this differently: Will accepting the contribution create a public relations  problem? 

These kinds of problems can be managed, but that takes time and effort. Do you have the bandwidth to deal with any potential fallout? If not, you might be wise to decline the gift.

Don’t blame the money

Let’s also remember that money itself is value neutral. Yes, there are corrupt ways to get it and stupid ways to spend it, but don’t blame the money. 

In most cases, especially with smaller donations, it’s literally impossible to know how the money was earned, who benefited, or if anyone was harmed. This is one more argument for building a base of individual donors rather than relying on grants.

My advice: accept these gifts graciously, don’t obsess about it, and use them to repair the world.