HRC’s Lobbying

A defense from Michael Petrelis. He cites Human Rights Campaign spending last year of $1.2 million on lobbying. It sounds impressive until you realize that that’s out of $39 million in 2006 income, according to their annual report – around 3 percent of the total. In contrast, they spent 21 percent of their income on fundraising for more dollars. In total, they say they spent another 19 percent of their budget on "federal, field electoral and legal advocacy" in 2006, an election year, and 25 percent on "Public Policy, Education and Training". The categories are vague to me (perhaps deliberately so) and I may be missing something. I’m not an expert on these things and I don’t want to misrepresent them. If readers more familiar than I with lobby groups can analyse and inspect the report here, I’d be grateful. All I’m trying to do is figure out if HRC as a whole is giving people value for money. Maybe readers can help.