People Finally Asking Questions, But Not in Detroit

Like Mack and Third, the Burning Man organizers are in the process of switching to non-profit status, but unlike Mack and Third, people are actually concerned about the money that Burning Man raises:

"How much money has the [Burning Man] festival made over the years? Its organizers don’t disclose revenue figures on a year-by-year basis. Burners know little about the finances behind the event they work so hard to create, and that bothers some of them."

In Detroit we don't care what happens to the money.  We just like believing we've made a difference and don't dare ask where the pocket change thrown in the buckets at the Kem concert ended up, how much was raised, or if it just disappeared.  Since the Kem concert's non-profit partner, Detroit Rescue Mission, doesn't make its audits accessible (at least on their website), we might never know.

Soft Money In Detroit

Yesterday, Detroit Rescue Mission's low Charity Navigator score was noted

This event needed a fiduciary through which they could raise money for charities.  People were encouraged to give money by PayPal through the month-old Mack and Third Foundation's website.  People who were able were also asked to bring money in lieu of canned goods to gain entry into KemFest today.

The Kem team of volunteers went around getting people to throw money in buckets:

But like soft-money campaign donations, soft-money charity donations collected by a for-profit through one of Detroit's lowest-rated charities are hard to keep track of.  Who knows how much money went into those buckets and how much money eventually made it to the Detroit Rescue Mission for distribution to the other beneficiary charities who participated today.

Since the DRMM doesn't use external auditors we have no way of knowing how much the last Kem concert brought in, in hard-money or soft-money, and may never know how much money was collected in the plastic buckets and brought back to concert headquarters all throughout the evening. 

We'll have to wait for when the open, responsible charities who do benefit from this event release their revenue statements at year end.

Charity Navigator Highlights MLive Story, Rates Charity Poorly

Detroit Rescue Mission, whom a neighbor heard is the fiduciary (read: "charity") through which the for-profit Kem entities are raising money in Cass Park tomorrow, has an embarrassingly low Charity Navigator rating of 42.21, with 11% going to administration and 12% going to "fundraising efforts" like this weekend's concert; well-run charities are able to keep admin at 5% or lower and get higher scores from Charity Navigator.

Charity Navigator also notes that the charity does not use outside accountants to audit their financials, and their website has no Form 990s or Audited Financials statements on it, so we may never know how much money the Kem concert brought in for DRMM and the other ten or so charities supposedly benefiting from this weekend's fundraiser.  There is nothing on the interwebs about how much the concert brought in last time.  You'd think this was something they'd want to brag about, no, unless a disappointing amount of money actually made it to the charities for whom they claimed to raise money.

But the good news is that Charity Navigator's charity news feed automatically updates, and the article discussing neighborhood concerns about the event is at the top of their news feed, and is also near the top of the list on Google searches.