Tax deductible? Proceed with caution.
BOSTON, January 6, 2020 – Like many others, on December 31st I received a number of solicitations from non-profits asking for year-end gifts. No surprise there. One of the emails included a subject line that proclaimed that time was running out to make my 2019 tax-deductible gift. That was a troubling surprise.
Prior to the 2017 tax law change, the non-profit sector routinely included tax-deductibility of gifts in their year-end emails. Starting January 1, 2018, the minimum standard deductions for individuals and married couples filing jointly (and who itemize) rose to $12,000 and $24,000 respectively, which essentially means that every dollar exceeding those amounts would then be eligible for a tax deduction.
It’s safe to say the vast majority of Americans will not exceed the minimum standard deduction in their annual giving, so the inference that a gift to their public media station would be tax-deductible is on shaky ground.
That realization prompted me to visit a number of public media and other non-profit/NGO web sites to find out how fundraisers were handling the end-of-year deadline. Many public media stations and all of the other charities I visited focused on mission, matches, or premiums to convert donors.
However, I was surprised to see several stations (including a few major markets) had web site light boxes that included the words “tax-deductible” to describe donations made by midnight. There were no qualifications, no asterisks, and no footnotes providing donors with the IRS rules regarding tax-deductibility.
Do we take for granted that our donors know their $100 gift wouldn’t qualify for the deduction because, after all, they’re some of the smartest consumers of news, information, arts, and culture in America?
The very same reason those people donate to public media (to support facts and information) is the reason I’m questioning why we’re soliciting them with an allusion to a tax benefit they will most likely not receive.
Are we in danger of losing credibility when the donor gathers her receipts for 2019, sure that she was going to be able to deduct her $100 gift, only to find that it’s not even close to the $12,000 threshold? She may still have that email from the station in her inbox. Perhaps stations put the asterisk on their donation forms (I did not see that on forms I visited by clicking through the light box), or the email acknowledgment/letter states the IRS language after the donation is made. But none of this seems quite on mission.
Public media is the most trusted source of information in the country. Our audience is, indeed, smart — we get slammed by the grammar police when we split infinitives, for crumb’s sake. So why put ourselves in the position of using grammatical legerdemain to solicit gifts when we know that the trustworthiness of our journalists and our overall mission are enough to warrant a contribution? Go ahead — create a sense of urgency with the December 31st deadline or encourage donors to fulfill their charitable giving goals by supporting the organization. But if we’re soliciting gifts considerably less than the standard deduction, it’s best not to strain credibility by using “tax-deductible” in our solicitations when we don’t have to.