Yesterday was Give to the Max day, and all your donations to Minnesota nonprofits — up to $500,000 — were matched by GiveMN.org through funds from the Saint Paul Foundation, the Minneapolis Foundation, and the Bush Foundation. What did this mean for non-profit media? MinnPost received 158 online donations, totaling $18,000. But they — in particular, David Brauer — seem far more concerned with the $5 million donation that MPR received. Evidently somebody gave $5 million anonymously to fund news coverage at MPR. Is such a large donation from an anonymous source a good idea? If the source is not identified, how will we know if coverage has been influenced? Presumably MPR knows who it is; should we?
Who Gave to the Max to MPR?
Nov 18 2009 — 10:37am
9 Reader Comments
10:53 am
If the donation were truly given anonymously, I don’t see any conflict of interest issues. However, if anyone at MPR does know the identity of the donor, then I think it should be acknowledged in some fashion. Even if it’s just initials. Otherwise, the speculation about issue conflicts will never cease. Just like speculation about Bill Kling’s salary went on for years and years.
11:00 am
The American Lung Association in Minnesota participated in GiveMN.org promotion, but we didn’t promote it much, other than a few tweets from me. We had 25 donors (no word yet on how much $), so our take was very modest (but welcome).
While I admire tranparancy, especially in nonprofits, I am not as concerned as Brauer seems to be. I think MPR should honor the donor’s request for anonymity. If MPR is doing it’s job, then bias toward the donor should not be a problem. In fact, if the reporters don’t know, they won’t feel influenced.
11:07 am
ALA prefers old school fundraising techniques: I get ALA envelopes from my old lady neighbor, ya know just to throw a little guilt in there.
11:10 am
Yes, we do use old school fundraising techniques, but not all of us think that’s the best way to go.
I’m no fundraiser, but I know what works for me…
3:01 pm
Given the state of the economy and the likely low levels of funding, it’s got to be awfully hard to turn down that kind of money over something as trivial as journalistic integrity. Oh, wait…are they a news organization?
6:37 pm
8:15 pm
that good
2:19 pm
Good, they should cancel pledge week for 4 years.
5:53 pm
A gift of this size was probably pre-arranged to take advantage of the Give to the Max day. Put another way, what I saw as a promotion to draw in smaller donors to fund a wide variety of organizations was abused by MPR which continues to prove it is not a good neighbor as it spreads its every growing empire in any way it can. The only thing that would convince me otherwise would be to pull the $5,000,000 out of the match pool so more is available to match other contributions.