An ungood idea

Mandatory service projects at high schools bend the meaning of voluntarism (aka volunteerism) as far or farther than it should ever have to go. Now an Arvada company is advertising on Craigslist what it calls -- apparently with no satiric intent -- "a paid volunteer program."

Unraffle.com first got my guard up because it's littered with so many typos it resembles a Nigerian scam letter. The company is described, for example, as being a "social-entrepranurial" venture. I can't imagine any actual entrepreneur, no matter how bad a typist, allowing a mistake like that to go live.

Bad spelling is no crime, of course. Soliciting funds on behalf of charities and neglecting to mention it to the charities, on the other hand -- well, that depends whether the money gets where it's supposed to go. Several charities are listed on Unraffle.com as being recipients of funds generated through the purchase of electronic "unraffle" tickets. Two of them are associated with Denver public schools, which particularly caught my interest: the DCIS Foundation, which supports the Denver Center for International Studies, a secondary school, and Art for Edison, which supports Edison Elementary School. Randy Thomae of Art for Edison told me by e-mail Saturday:

I had never heard of Unraffle. I just googled them, and was quite surprised to see our name listed there. We have no affiliation whatsoever. Thank you for bringing this to my attention.

Jonathan Sandberg, Unraffle's founder, replied to an e-mail inquiry late Saturday that Unraffle is merely in beta test and has not yet collected any funds. If and when it ever does, he pointed out, charities don't need to give prior permission to receive support. (True enough, though using logos without permission seems, at the very least, unbusinesslike, as charities need to control their intellectual property just like for-profits do.) As for the charities that appear currently on the site as grantees, he wrote, "we featured a few local and non-local charities that we love and respect and would like to support/raise money for, in order to ascertain the depth of interest in our project."

If Unraffle is a beta, it's an extraordinarily slow one, since the site says "copyright 2001-2009." Perhaps a distinction needs to be made between the "paid volunteer" program and Unraffle itself. In the Craigslist ad, it's the "paid volunteer" program that is said to be in beta; Unraffle is portrayed as a going concern. My conclusion was that Unraffle has been selling unraffle tickets on behalf of charities since 2001, and that the October 2009 innovation is the "paid volunteer" program, though Sandberg tells me I'm mistaken. How, then, to explain language on the site that uses tenses other than the future, e.g., "Part one and two of the Unraffle.com mission has always been to be effective in raising money for our causes while uncompromisingly nurturing and supporting our paid volunteers"? Indeed, Sandberg tells me he already has "personally made" around $238,000 this way.

The application for the "paid volunteer" program describes an online, multilevel marketing arrangement in which "associates" earn 16.5% commission on the sale of unraffle tickets (it's actually now 30%, Sandberg said) and "directors" also earn 16.5% of their associates' sales. Here, in about the middle of the fine print, is the key to the whole thing:

In order to be accepted into the program, directors are required to pay a $250 set up fee and a $150 monthly membership fee.

In our e-mail exchange, Sandberg asserted that "Unraffle.com is a social venture project that donates 100% of its revenues to charitable causes." When I pointed out that it's not possible to subtract anything from something and be left with everything, he offered this correction:

In my haste to respond to your email I neglected to say "net" revenues in my reply. As stated on the site, "Unraffle.com donates 100% of it's earnings to charitable causes." I'll let you look up the definition of earnings and "Social Venture" but because we are a for-profit business we can really distribute profits as we see fit. It is just our decision to donate 100% of earnings to charitable causes.

Profits, earnings, revenues... if the company's founder can't keep them straight, what is the likelihood that Unraffle's associates and directors will relay accurate information to purchasers of unraffle tickets? Once you start throwing around a figure like "100%" in the context of charitable fundraising, you're almost automatically being dishonest with donors. As someone who has made a decent living as overhead, and hopes to again, I am certainly in favor of a professional model, which holds that fairly compensating fundraisers and administrators makes it possible to deliver charitable services more efficiently and effectively than would be possible with volunteers alone.

If Unraffle can do well by doing good, or even do a little good by doing well -- well, that's well and good! Perhaps Unraffle is no more a scam than those police and firefighters' benevolent associations that have been targeted by journalists for having outrageously high fundraising costs. Being bad at what you do isn't against the law.

Bear in mind, however, that there is no such thing as paid voluntarism. Paying for the privilege of raising charitable donations in hopes of a big personal payoff strikes me as an awfully ungood idea.