Are donations for veterans going to telemarketers instead?

The Center for Public Integrity reports a majority of donations to a veterans' charity is going to telemarketers.

The founder of Circle of Friends for American Veterans, Hampton, reportedly managed to use the charity to pay himself 75,000 in the first half of 2017.

Circle of Friends for American Veterans was founded in 1993 by Brian Hampton in Falls Church, Virginia according to the Center for Public Integrity. In 2015, Hampton had acquired another nonprofit and reportedly raked in $340,216 total in less than a decade. The Center for Public Integrity says this is in part due to Outreach Calling, a telemarketing company run by a man banned from fundraising in New York and who remains under investigation.

Hampton, a veteran himself, says he hires telemarketers because it's the cheapest and easiest way to fundraise:

Over the course of 24 years, I have tried every other fundraising technique known to me in over four decades with fundraising experience, most of them over and over again, with different variations... None of those efforts produced revenue remotely close to the revenue generated by telemarketing.

Brian Hampton, founder, Circle of Friends for American Veterans (to Center for Public Integrity)

Hampton claims that fundraising without the help of telemarketers was "was grueling, inefficient work." He also says that leaving most of the grunt work to telemarketers frees up his time for charitable work, such as running a shelter for homeless veterans in Washington, D.C.

You can read the Center for Public Integrity's article on the issue here: Charity money going to telemarketers.

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