The National Organization for Women routinely claims that it has 250,000 to 500,000 members and a budget of $10 million, but are those figures accurate? That’s what Marie-Jose Ragab of the renegade Dulles, Virginia, NOW chapter, wanted to know. Based on NOW’s required 501(c) filings with the IRS, Ragab claims the figures don’t even come close.
As Ragab notes, almost all nonprofits exaggerate their membership figures somewhat, but NOW appears to be one of the select few who take such exaggerations to outrageous levels. Ragab notes that in its 501(c) filing for 1999, NOW reported income from memberships at $2,903,383. Since a yearly individual membership to NOW costs $35, that would yield about 89,500 paying members.
It is true that NOW has a sliding scale of memberships that allow some people to pay as little as $15 for membership, but even if we assume that everyone pays just $15 to be a member and nobody pays the $35 fee, that’s still just over 190,000 members — not even close to the recent claims it has made of 500,000 members.
There are similar distortions in the overall NOW budget. Although NOW claims to have a budget approaching $10 million, in fact its IRS filings puts its highest level of income over the past five years at just over $5.5 million, and that figure has seriously declined. Ragab reports that NOW’s IRS forms show that NOW’s annual revenues declined by almost $1 million from 1996-1999, with most of the decline in revenues coming from a decline in memberships. Ragab believes that the decline in revenues was linked to NOW’s position (or lack thereof) on the Monica Lewinsky affair, noting that NOW revenues declined by an astounding $660,000 from 1998 to 1999.
NOW’s level of exaggeration is nothing compared to the closely-associated Feminist Majority Foundation, however. That group claims to have 100,000 members, with an annual membership costing $35. But its 1998 tax returns show that its total revenues for 1998 were a mere $318,000 which would give the foundation at most one-tenth the number of paying members it claims.
A likely explanation for how the figures are inflated is that they count past members who are no longer contributing to the organization. A number of other non-profits such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals claim astounding levels of membership by counting anyone who has ever contributed money to the organization over, say, the last five years.
Source:
Ten Million Dollars Budget? 250,000 Members? Think Again! Marie-Jose Ragab, Dulles Now, April 5, 2001.