Why does your school know how much your house cost?

Hello, welcome to your Thursday FOIAball. Did you know I unintentionally invented an entirely new form of journalism? 

Yes, other reporters are now reporting on the FOIAs being sent to public universities. 

Name another publication that’s reimagined how news works in less than a year? 

Just out of curiosity, how much do you think I know about you? Literally you, reading this.

It’s not much. I try to collect as little data as possible. When you entered your email, I didn’t require you to make a profile with your name and address. 

I can see what emails that address opens and what links were clicked. But I typically only view that in aggregate.

For those who pay for FOIAball, transactions are handled by Stripe. I’m sure there are issues with that platform, but none of your financial information comes my way.

You’re probably well aware of FOIAball’s stance on technology, big data, and the surveillance state. We never, ever want to become part of the system.

Plus, and this is probably the bigger caveat, one I should have led with… we are not trying to raise $150 million.

When you are a university trying to raise $150 million, it’s understandable that you want a lot of data about your donors. I’m not saying it’s a good thing. I’m just saying I get the utility. It’s much easier to get $500,000 from someone you know has $30 million in the bank than it is from a retired public school teacher. 

But while you may know a few donors who are swimming in cash, either from headlines about their gaudy purchases or their angry tweets about Obama, a great deal of American wealth is hidden. People don’t talk about their salaries, their investments, their real estate portfolio. We have an entire tax code built around obscuring actual net worth. 

Luckily, thankfully, praise the heavens, what we do have is extremely lax regulations around data privacy.

Schools everywhere are always, constantly, undertaking large-scale fundraising drives. A hundred million here, a half-billion there. 

Michigan State just got a $400 million gift from a single person. They’re using it to raise another $600 million. Tennessee just finished a $500 million fundraising push. Michigan is doing a drive for $400 million, just for athletics. 

It should not be glossed over that these numbers are insane.

They say they need it, though. How do they get it? FOIAball obtained loads of fundraising documents from a school’s recent $150 million campaign. We published one story on them back in April. We have so much more. Like the school’s entire donor roll, which shows how over 4,200 individuals are tracked across dozens and dozens of data points. 

All to ensure you are separated from as much money as possible, so your stadium can have a new ring of high-end luxury suites that you’ll never see the inside of. Or whatever. I actually didn’t look up what this particular campaign was for. Whoops. 

For our university, which we aren’t naming (at least not until next week!), they calculated that raising $147,000,000 would require the services of 190 specific donors. 

The rest of you poors are looped into “numerous” members of the “community” who are expected to contribute another $3 million. 

This school is planning on wrangling one $25 million gift, three $10 million donations, five $5 million pledges, and so on. Here’s a handy chart I reproduced. 

But how do you know which 190 people can give those specific figures? Welcome to my least favorite new thing in the world: wealth screening.

The fundraising platforms schools use offer proprietary data mining services that scour the internet for every single data point about you to determine a capacity score. Which is exactly what it sounds like: how much a school thinks you’re able to give them. 

Are these systems now supercharged by AI? You better freakin’ believe it.

The data they obtain is, let's just say, extremely thorough. One of the largest platforms, Kindsight, boasts that it has records for over 1.2 billion people. Are you in that data set? Probably! Did you agree to let this random company determine how much you might be worth and then sell that information? Absolutely the heck not. 

Don’t… don’t worry. In a video about its capabilities, the company addressed questions of whether collecting this data and giving it to paying customers is ethical. 

It’s ethical, they said!

Companies like these (Kindsight is just one of a few) ethically pull your political giving through FEC data. They ethically scour real estate databases to see how much your house is worth. They ethically review SEC filings to see what stocks you might own.

You know those big boards they print out at events and galas to show who gave at what level? Like, “Thank you, Platinum Sponsors.” 

If a charity uploads a PDF of that, they ethically scan that to see how much you’ve given.

I’m not kidding. Thank you to the Institute for Nonprofit News, a charity you actually should give to, which uploaded a recent training its fundraising team got on wealth screening. I don’t think they meant for it to be used this way. Sorry! Gimme a grant and I’ll delete this whole article.

These firms take all that data and build a profile of you, to see how much you are worth. Does it determine your salary? One firm dances around that, saying it uses “income signals.” 

Another laments that salary data is “private information,” but notes it can “use various data points to estimate income levels, including professional positions, neighborhood demographics, and other public indicators.”

These services also hype their ability to instantly recognize when wealth signals go up, so schools can ramp up their outreach. 

Think about that. You announce a promotion on LinkedIn. You move to a nicer home. And your school gets to know right away, so they can ask you for more money. 

All this turns into your calculated giving capacity. At our school, that becomes a letter grade. 

Wanna get an A? Good luck. To be in the top tier, you need the ability to give over $100 million. Not be worth over $100 million. To have that lying around.

Our school has three As. One is one of the 25 richest people in the world. Do we have loads of his giving data? Yes, we do.

To earn a B, you need to be in the $50-99 million range. A D is for people who can only give $10-24 million.

Where might you fall? Can you give $1,000 over five years? Then you are an O.

Seriously, that’s the best you could do? Imagine having to tell your parents you got an O in wealth. For shame. 

But it does mean that, even at your low level, you probably got screened.

There is, my friends, so much more. Affinity scores, engagement scores, velocity scores, not to mention individualized notes about every single point of outreach, plus maybe some names and dollar amounts. Because why not?

Which is for our next installment. 

Thank you, as always, for reading FOIAball. We’ll see you next week.