Judith Johnson of Stacyville, Iowa, doesn’t get out much anymore.
Legally blind and living on a small Social Security pension, the 72-year-old used to go to church once a week. She stopped out of fear that her new walker would snag on the railroad tracks she had to cross to get there.
But Johnson, whose tiny apartment is decorated with crucifixes, still believes it’s her duty to help those less fortunate.
So when telemarketers call on behalf of cancer patients, homeless veterans or disabled firefighters, the retired secretary finds it hard to say no.
That penchant for giving made Johnson the target of America’s billion-dollar charity fundraising industry.
In one recent year, callers persuaded her to write 25 checks to 11 different charities.
The repeated calls were no fluke.
Each one can be traced back to a single source – Associated Community Services, a Michigan-based company that is one of the nation’s largest charity telemarketing firms.
After Johnson gave to one charity, the firm put her on a list that got her bombarded with calls for nearly a dozen more company clients. Telemarketers sometimes called several times a day.
Johnson told one phone solicitor she couldn’t afford to give to a charity called Children with Hair Loss.
“She said, ‘You’re going to let this poor little child be bald-headed when they’re only 4 years old?’ ” Johnson recalled. “I really felt bad for the children, so I think I gave her around $10.”
Unbeknownst to Johnson, about $1.75 of that donation made it to the charity. The telemarketing firm pocketed the rest.
Johnson’s story is just like that of millions of Americans who give once over the phone only to find themselves flooded with calls for more causes.
To track how this happens, the Tampa Bay Times and The Center for Investigative Reporting scrutinized how a single company, Associated Community Services, operated in one state that has amassed a treasure trove of data.
Reporters interviewed 10 current and former employees and examined internal company documents subpoenaed by the Iowa attorney general. Iowa regulators used the records, which provide a rare glimpse into the inner workings of the charity industry, to build a case against the firm. Earlier this year, a judge in Iowa ordered Associated Community Services to stop soliciting in that state until it fully complied with a subpoena. The telemarketer is appealing the ruling.
In interviews, phone solicitors described the tactics they used to persuade donors to give. Along with the records, which include details about every Iowa donor who gave 10 times or more, their descriptions reveal a deliberate strategy of targeting trusting donors and exploiting their generosity to fuel profits in the name of charity.
From March 2010 through June 2011, nearly 400 Iowans made 10 or more donations to the firm’s charity clients. Total number of donations from the frequent-donor group: more than 5,500, worth a combined $102,000.

Associated Community Services would hit up its most reliable givers dozens of times in a year, with no regard for their age or financial situation.
Calls came so often that nearly half of the repeat donors gave to two different charity clients in a single day.
In an email, company officials said they call people on their hot list randomly and do not purposefully call multiple times a day.
“If the stars aligned properly, it is possible that a potential donor phone number could be called for several charities in one day,” President Richard Cole wrote. “But this would be an unusual incident.”
Cole also said the company does not target the elderly and has no way of knowing the age or financial situation of the people they call.
But the Iowa attorney general found that most of the company’s prolific donors – those who gave 20 times or more – were 69 or older.
The top donor was a man in his 80s in Dubuque. In just over a year, he made 38 donations totaling $1,375 to 13 of the telemarketer’s charities.
Six times, he gave to two of the firm’s clients on the same day.
The Iowa data details one company’s operations in a state with roughly 3 million residents. But industry experts and the firm’s employees who worked the phones say it is representative of how Associated Community Services and many other telemarketers do business across the nation.
Industry experts said such practices are used primarily by telemarketing companies that do cold-calling and take a percentage of the donations raised, rather than a flat fee, for their service.
The vast majority of the nation’s 1.6 million nonprofits do not use telemarketing firms. Charities that hire these phone solicitors wind up with a fraction of what gets raised. Financial filings by clients represented by Associated Community Services show the firm and its related companies keep as much as 85 cents of every dollar donated. Once charities pay their own administrative costs – including rent and salaries – it often means pennies on the dollar make it to those in need.
Earlier this year, the Times and CIR examined thousands of charities that hire professional solicitors and identified the 50 worst based on how much they had paid these outside fundraisers over a decade. Nine of the 50 worst charities hired Associated Community Services to raise donations in Iowa and elsewhere nationwide.
The company collects donations in small amounts, meaning even repeat donors typically spend a few hundred dollars a year. But the money adds up. IRS records filed by charities show that Associated Community Services raised nearly $40 million for its clients in 2011.
Cole said the company, which employed 1,000 telemarketers in 2010, instructs employees not to collect money from people who seem confused or can’t hear well.
But former employees said any such guidelines were widely ignored in the rush to generate profits.
Ex-workers said they felt pressured to keep pitching even if people were crying about their own losses or if they were elderly and confused.
Some people seemed starved for conversation, workers said. One former employee said he got a $50 pledge from a woman who kept him on the line for two hours. By the end, she had invited him to come visit and offered to include him in her will.
Another caller, Dwight David “Spyder” Turner, worked at the company for two years. He said he was fired in January for failing to push hard enough to make the “sale.”
“You’d get people on the phone who sounded like they were dying or not all there,” said Turner, a 66-year-old resident of Detroit. “With that job, you had to leave your conscience and compassion at the door.”
Inside the phone room
John Abraham never met the people on the other end of the line.
But for four years, he made his living off their generosity, handling 300 to 400 calls a day as an employee of Associated Community Services.
Though Abraham, 43, left the company last year, he can still launch into a persuasive charity pitch at will.
“I won’t lie,” he said recently. “I was pretty good at it.”
Abraham learned to sell in the Detroit area, where Associated Community Services has two locations packed full of $10-an-hour telemarketers.
New hires rarely stay long in these high-pressure jobs. But for those who excel, the rewards can be great. In good years, the company raffled off TVs and cars at the office Christmas party, Abraham said.
In his job as a cold caller, Abraham was among those making the first pitch to prospective donors. If he persuaded someone to give, that person was marked as a “reload” – a designation that meant they would be hit up again for the same charity.
Reloads would also immediately go into the company’s dialing system so they could be solicited for other charity clients.
Sometimes, Abraham said, another pitch would come the very same day.
“They’d call you for breast cancer in the morning and veterans at night,” he said.
Although legal, the practice is frowned upon by many in the nonprofit world.
Instead of helping charity clients cultivate loyal benefactors, it drains generous donors by tapping them frequently for an array of causes, said Roger Craver, a 50-year veteran of the fundraising business.
“They’re ripping the charity and the donor off because they’re not permitting a relationship to grow between the two,” Craver said.
Because so many contributions are $10 to $20, it puts even more pressure on telemarketers to dial relentlessly to drive profits in a high-volume business.
To hit their quotas, the employees who spoke to the Times and CIR said they were trained to push hard under almost any circumstance.
Abraham said he once reached a man on his cellphone at a funeral.
“You get in trouble if you didn’t pitch them anyway,” he said. “You’re supposed to say, ‘I’m sorry for your loss, but our veterans are struggling every day.’ ”
Company documents submitted to Oregon regulators in 2010 show that telemarketers were trained to keep pushing even when they got a wrong number.
“I’m terribly sorry,” the instructions say. “We’re calling as many residents as possible in (their state) to let you know what we’re doing, so I’ll be brief (immediately go to opening).”
Turner, the former Associated Community Services telemarketer, said the firm was constantly pressing workers to get people to give by credit card, rather than check, so the sale could be processed immediately.
“If I had an old lady on the phone who was sick in bed, I wasn’t about to tell her I’ll hold on while she goes and gets her credit card,” Turner said. “But that’s what you were supposed to do.”
High pressure pays off