Corporate Accountability Intl. Stretches a Claim

This entry is part 2 of 3 in the series The Accountability of Corporate Accountability International

Corporate Accountability International (CAI), a Boston-based NGO, makes the following claim on PDF page 9 of their publication “30 Years of Setting the New Standard.”

Members range from doctors to students to teachers to members of faith communities and provide 90 percent of our funding.

This claim gives the impression that CAI is 90% supported financially by individuals and not by organizations. Certainly, that’s an admirable position for an NGO to be in. Such financing adds to the much coveted “grassroots” caché. But is the claim true? Is CAI actually 90% supported by individual donors?

If you’re thinking “I suppose it’s not true, otherwise why would Richard be writing about this?”, then you’re right. Since companies have their claims challenged frequently, I thought I’d be different and challenge a claim of an NGO that doesn’t get as much oversight.

The CAI claim of 90% individual donor support is not accurate. Let me explain how I discovered this.

How I Discovered This

As I’ve noted in my previous post about Corporate Accountability International, this organization has published a listing of their donors. So, I used this information to test the accuracy of their 90% claim. The list of donors I chose as a sample to analyze appears on PDF page 11 of CAI’s 2010 annual report. The donor list contains names of individuals and foundations and corresponds to CAI’s 2009 fiscal year.

The contributions of individuals are private information that is not required to be released to the public. But, the contributions of foundations are public information and can be seen on the donating foundation’s Form 990, a publicly-available tax return document required for annual filing by non-profit organizations in the United States. Foundations qualify as non-profit organizations.

The 2010 annual report’s list of donors is broken down into contribution ranges. The first range contains donors contributing over $5,000. The second range contains donors contributing between $1,000 and $4,999. There are other ranges, but their contribution ranges are smaller. Since I was just trying to get a “ballpark” estimate on whether the 90% claim was true, I chose to concentrate on the first two ranges only. And anyway, after examining the total list I found that most of the foundations donating to CAI fell within the first two ranges, so that was another reason to just concentrate on only those two ranges.

In the two ranges on this list I identified 30 foundations for research. I used Guidestar.org to access each foundation’s Form 990. (Guidestar.org is a great free resource for this type of information.) Here’s what I found.

What I Found

Of the 30 foundations in the first two ranges on the donor list, there were 14 for which I could identify no donations to CAI. This lack of information was due to mainly two reasons. First, for some of the foundations shown in the donor list I simply could not find any Form 990s for the organization’s name as shown. Second, for some of the other foundations, I found

Continue reading Corporate Accountability Intl. Stretches a Claim

November 21st, 2011 | Tags: , , , , | Category: Corporate Accountability International, Corporate Accountability International, Finance, NGOs/Activists | Leave a comment

Know More About NGOs. After All, You Pay For Them.

Today, let’s discuss responsible consumption, which can cut in more directions than one. Let me explain.

A current topic discussed in the news is for consumers to assume responsibility for their purchases, taking steps to be as certain as possible that their purchases don’t support companies committing environmentally harmful acts or companies that may behave in a socially irresponsible manner. These are certainly worthwhile goals. The world could do with less environmental harm and less social irresponsibility, committed by either corporations or individuals.

Of course, one problem that consumers would have in making such decisions would be with the identification of such companies. The problem lies in the semantics; just what does “environmentally harmful” or “socially irresponsible” mean, and who defines such things. If you read the business press regularly, or even if you occasionally read this blog, you’ll know that many of those definitions are set by NGO and activist groups such as Greenpeace, Rainforest Action Network, and Corporate Accountability International. It is these groups, these “semantical gatekeepers,” who have appointed themselves to define what is “environmentally harmful” or what is “socially irresponsible.” I suppose that’s better than no one taking on this task, but such power in the hands of a limited number of groups can be unsettling. Perhaps what is needed here, in addition to more “responsible consumption” of companies, is more responsible consumption of these “semantical gatekeepers,” a “monitoring of the monitors,” if you will. But what’s to motivate the public in taking such an interest? How about a financial interest? The criterion of money usually hits home.

Whether you know it or not, if you are an American taxpayer, you support these semantical gatekeepers, the groups who decide from whom you should buy and from whom you should not.

How so?

August 19th, 2010 | Tags: , , , , , , , | Category: Activism, Finance, Government, NGOs/Activists, Rainforest Action Network, Rainforest Action Network Studies, Truth | Leave a comment

Corporate Accountability CEO Makes "More" Than Mickey D CEO?

Back in January of this year, I wrote a post about the compensation differences between the CEO of Greenpeace and the CEO of Exxon Mobil. From the research which was the foundation of the article, I found that, as a percentage of revenue, the Greenpeace CEO makes far more than the Exxon Mobil CEO. You may read that post entitled, “Greenpeace CEO Makes ‘More’ Than Exxon Mobil CEO?” by clicking here. Since it was published, that post has been one of the most popularly read on this blog. And since, on this blog, I like to give readers topics in which they have an interest, today I write a similar article, but this time it’s about two different “competitors.”

In recent weeks and months, Corporate Accountability International (CAI), an irregular competitor, has been very much in the news with their dual objective campaign against Mc Donald’s. Those objective are: (1) to get the company to stop promoting its Happy Meal product through the offer of toy giveaways (this objective is in partnership with the Center for Science in the Public Interest, see here and here) and, (2) to convince Mc Donald’s to retire their corporate icon, Ronald Mc Donald. All this CAI attention toward Mc Donald’s piqued my curiosity about this irregular competitor, CAI. So, in the same vein as the Greenpeace – Exxon Mobil comparison, and in the interest of giving my readership topics in which it has interest, I decided to do some research regarding the CEO compensation of these two adversary organizations. The findings were surprising.

July 29th, 2010 | Tags: , , , , , , , , | Category: Activist CEO Compensation, Corporate Accountability International, Corporate Accountability International, Food, Mc Donald's | One comment
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