Category: Wealth Tips

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Why Your Donation to a Cancer Appeal Will Not Help Find a Cure

For a start, there has never yet been a cure found by a foundation set up to raise funds for a disease on which their livelihood depends. This researcher found criminal indifference to cancer prevention and conflicts of interest.

A 1992 article in the Wall Street Journal, by Thomas DiLorenzo, professor of economics
at Loyola College and veteran investigator of nonprofit organizations, revealed that the Texas
affiliate of the ACS owned more than $11 million of assets in land and real estate, more than 56
vehicles, including 11 Ford Crown Victorias for senior executives, and 45 other cars assigned to
staff members. ACS chapters in Arizona, California, and Missouri spent only 10 percent of their
funds on direct community services. Thus for every $1 spent on direct services, approximately
$6.40 was spent on compensation and overhead. In all ten states, salaries and fringe benefits
were by far the largest single budget items, a surprising fact in light of the characterization of the
appeals, which stressed an urgent and critical need for donations to provide cancer services. http://www.preventcancer.com/documents/ACS.pdf

Never is there a more appropriate example of the old saying, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” A great site to visit to learn the specific causes of different types of cancer so you know what to avoid: http://www.preventcancer.com/avoidable/

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Business Tip re Advertising Discounts

Ogilvy and Mather had a unit called the Ogilvy Centre for Research in San Francisco. The director, Alex Biehl, was working on a project called PIMS. PIMS stood – I think – for Profit Impact of Marketing Strategies.
Over 200 firms took part, and the project was run in partnership with Professor Andrew Ehrenberg at the London Business School. (David Ogilvy always said Andrew had the best mind in marketing.)
One thing the project revealed was very simple, very important – yet seemed to be news to almost all marketers: Firms that spend more money on discounting than advertising are far less profitable than those that spend more on advertising than discounting.
The project divided the firms into four quartiles. Those in the top quartile spent the most on advertising and the least on discounting. Those in the bottom quartile did it the other way round.
The firms in the top quartile were on average twice as profitable as those in the bottom one.
Think about it. When you spend more on offering deals than explaining why people should want to buy your stuff, you are perilously close to saying, “Our stuff is not good enough to sell on its merits at full price.”

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You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it

“You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that, my dear friend, is about the end of any nation.

You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it.”

The late Dr. Adrian Rogers, 1931 – 2005.