It would seem with such serious losses for the anti-rights crowd that more donors would be bailing out. I mean the Democrats as a whole won’t touch the issue after the Al Gore loss. A few do, but then again, so do a few GOP members. The big gun stories of the year include the Democratic Senator who carries a gun to work with him and his concealed carry permit and one tragic shooting that’s lead to the Democratic Party (including the Congressman that represents Virginia Tech) turning to the NRA for suggestions in coming up with a gun bill.

Well, let’s look at the Form 990 of the Brady Campaign. Well, we have to look at two of them – one for the Campaign (a 501(c)4 organization) and one for the Center (a 501(c)3 organization). (For those of you who are wondering, the tax status determines what they can do. Political activity is generally a no-no for non-profits who want the benefit of a tax deduction for their donors. A 501(c)4 lets you do political activity, but donations aren’t a write off – similar to when you donate to NRA-ILA. A 501(c)3 does allow donors to write off the donation, but they can’t do a whole lot on the political front, as activities must be “educational” in nature – similar to when you donate to NRA Foundation or the Civil Rights Defense Fund.)

I was able to easily access the forms for 2005 and 2004. I’m not going to spend the $30 Guidestar charges to view forms older than that. Sorry.

In 2004, the Campaign reported a total revenue of $7,450,648 and expenses of $7,784,137. That’s a loss of $333,489. Interesting to note that of their expenses, 69.4% went to program services, a hair under 6% went to management, and 24.7% went to fundraising.

In 2005, the Campaign reported total revenue of $5,743,607 and expenses of $5,608,355. They managed to save $135,252, but that’s still only 41% of their losses from the year before. A few changes from the previous year show that in 2005, only 60% of their expenses went to support program services, 7.3% went to management, and a jump to 32.7% went to fundraising. When your program services start going down and your fundraising eats up more of your budget, that’s usually a bad thing.

Factoring in assets from previous years, the Campaign had $197,163 at the end of 2004 and $333,349 at the end of 2005 thanks to their ability to cut their budgets even though revenues were down substantially.

Now, for the fuller picture, let’s look at the Center’s reports. If they started funneling more money into the Center in 2005, then the Campaign’s loss of $1.7 million dollars from ‘04 to ‘05 is no big deal. The money usually goes to the same programs anyway, it’s just a matter of whether it gets counted as “education” or not from one year to the next.

In 2004, the Center reported total revenue of $3,901,392 and expenses of $4,093,252 for a loss of $191,860. For the Center, program services ate up 79% of expenses, management took 5.9%, and fundraising served as 15.6% of their costs.

In 2005, the Center reported total revenue of $3,298,433 and expenses of $3,469,038 for a loss of $170,605.  For the Center, the split for expenses in 2005 came out to 76.9% for program services, 6.8% on management, and 16.3% for fundraising.

Factoring in assets from previous years, the Center had $2,177,880 at the end of 2004 and $2,007,244 at the end of 2005.  That’s digging into the organization’s assets two years in a row.  Not good.

So we can see that the two major divisions of the Brady Bunch did see a combined loss of $2,310,000 in revenue from 2004 to 2005.  With losses like the passage of the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act that took several of their big legal challenges off the table, it’s not a shock that they would see a drop in 2005.  It will be interesting to see their 2006 numbers, the year that Michael Barnes left and Paul Helmke took over.  Of course, he didn’t take over until the first quarter was over, so the 2007 numbers would really be more reflective.  If with the Parker case and Virginia Tech, the Brady Bunch doesn’t regain all of the lost revenue and more, I would say they have to start making cuts.  They don’t have the assets to support themselves for even a few months if donations take a drastic drop.

No obviously related posts.