Consumer advocacy icon pads telemarketer bottom line?

Dedicated Murketing readers may recall my exasperation at Habitat for Humanity last year, when I wondered if all the money I donated to this organization was simply funneled directly into schemes and gimmicks related to asking me for money.

Well, on somewhat-related note, the L.A. Times looked into fundraising practices of nonprofits that hire for-profit telemarketing firms and the like and found:

hundreds of examples of charities that pocketed just a sliver of what commercial fundraisers collected in their names. Some didn’t get a dime or even lost money.

This by way of Dynamist, which points to a particularly embarrassing example not highlighted by LAT: “‘consumer advocates’ at Public Citizen … actually lost 6 percent on their telemarketing.”

Ugh.