Category: Guns

I’m not done crunching numbers with the Brady Campaign. And I have to give them some credit for remaining consistent in their spending given the tight times they’ve had over the last few years.

I was curious if the organization (or rather, organizations, since I examined both the Center and the Campaign together) would make cuts in any one particular area. Would they figure a way to cut fundraising costs, axe general management expenses, or chop programs? Other than the blip of 2005, they have actually been consistent in the percentage of their expenses that each of those categories eats.

That blip in 2005 showed they cut services to increase fundraising. This is rather interesting if you look back at a graph I already posted that showed their revenues for the same time.

See that bid drop off for 2005? That means that increasing the percentage of their expenses on fundraising didn’t actually stop the plunge in revenue. Regardless of the fact that fundraising surged to more than 25% of their expenses, their revenues dropped by more than 20%. Even though their revenues continued to fall, never by so much as 2005. That tells me they get more for their dollar by investing in programs rather than direct fundraising costs. Some other groups could learn a thing or two about that concept.

Again, by reader request, I reworked the numbers a bit. beatbox made a good point that combining the total donations and expenses of both the Brady Campaign and Brady Center would give us a better picture of the organization’s overall health. I would agree in very broad terms.*

As you can see, 2008 is really the outlier when you look at the combined revenue/expense model. That shouldn’t be shocking because of not only the recession, but the Heller loss early in the year before most donations arrive. There is definitely a downward trend, but their combined “cushions” didn’t really take a major hit until 2008.

*It was still handy to break down the individual data because that tells us if they are heading for a re-alignment and/or shifting their strategy. At some point, they will need to reorganize and probably rename themselves again. Consider that the main event they use to tug at heartstrings happened just two months after I was born – and I’m approaching the age where women start lying about their age. There’s no context or meaning to it anymore for a good number of Americans. With the courts as the new major battleground for the next few decades, it just makes sense for them to shift their limited resources to litigation and related support services. These are the changes we will see in the organization breakdown featured in the first post on the subject.

In the last post, beatbox mentioned the Brady campaign finance data for their PAC arm and how much it has been hurting in recent years. I didn’t include that information in the initial look at the Brady finances because without diving into tons of very convoluted campaign finance reports, it’s a pain in the ass to break out by individual year as opposed to election cycle. And really, a year-by-year breakdown won’t give you any more insight that’s worth looking at. I wanted to keep the data sets in one post the same, or in the case of this post, similar.

Joe Huffman also piped up that he had some older 990s from the Brady camp, though it turns out they are only for the Center. Hugely useful data going back to 1999 (technically 1997, but missing 1998, so I’ll start out in 1999) for the Center, and he deserves a huge kudos for putting that together. But, because the Campaign appears to have been their core source of income until 2008, I don’t want to skew the data by updating only the Center’s numbers in the last post.

So what do the prior two paragraphs mean? Just that here is the data for the Brady PAC donation/expenditures/cash on hand for 1997-2008 (the 1998-2008 cycles) and the Brady Center revenue/expenses/ending assets for 1999-2008. (The ending asset is what I previously described as their cushion or nest egg, essentially savings they can dip into when they spend too much.)

Remember, these are similar time periods, not perfect matches. The PAC cycle includes two years that the Center graph does not.

For those of you keeping score at home, this shows that the “cushion” they could dip into when major legal threats come up has fallen by more than 67% since 1999.