The Art of the Steal: The NRA Foundation Wants Donors to Forget Why They Donated

By Chris Dorsey

America has produced some remarkable business models over the years. Apple convinced millions of people to stand in line overnight to buy phones that were only marginally different from the phones they already owned. Amazon persuaded consumers that waiting two days for a package constitutes a hardship. Coca-Cola somehow built one of the most valuable brands in human history selling flavored sugar water.

Yet even those corporate giants may have to tip their hats to what could become one of the most audacious nonprofit maneuvers ever attempted: spending thirty-five years raising money under one of the most recognizable names in America, accumulate roughly $200 million in charitable assets through that association, then rebrand under a completely different name and act bewildered when donors ask whether the money was supposed to follow the brand that inspired the donations in the first place.

That, in simplified form, appears to be the proposition now confronting NRA members, volunteers, and donors as the organization formerly known as the NRA Foundation rebrands itself as the “1791 Foundation” after the NRA sued the Foundation and demanded, among other things, that it stop using the NRA name.

The remarkable part here isn’t the name change itself. Organizations rebrand all the time. Corporations do it. Nonprofits do it. Professional sports teams do it. The remarkable part is the apparent expectation that everyone should pretend the previous three decades never happened.

For most of its existence, the NRA Foundation enjoyed what marketers would describe as an unfair competitive advantage. It had a name that already meant something. It didn’t have to spend decades building brand awareness and credibility because that had already been built by generations of NRA members, instructors, volunteers, hunters, competitive shooters, youth coaches, and donors.

Every Friends of NRA dinner, every fundraising banquet, every auction, raffle, sponsorship package, and donor appeal drew from the strength of those three letters. And the Foundation wasn’t shy about that relationship. In fact, the relationship was the entire fundraising proposition.

No one attended a Friends of NRA dinner and auction because they were passionately devoted to the future vision of an organization called the 1791 Foundation. Nobody spent years volunteering because they hoped one day the NRA connection would become optional. Nobody sat through endless fundraising dinners thinking, “My greatest wish is that someday the organization that’s using the NRA name to raise money decides the NRA name wasn’t really that important after all.”

Yet that appears to be the argument donors are now being asked to accept. The NRA name was indispensable when raising the money, but incidental when determining who should control it. That’s an intellectual feat so impressive it deserves its own Olympic event. One can almost picture the judges awarding perfect scores for difficulty while deducting points for excessive use of donor amnesia.

Imagine if tomorrow Harvard announced it was changing its name to the New England Institute of Historical Learning but intended to keep every dime generated by a century of Harvard alumni giving while insisting the Harvard brand itself had little to do with the institution’s success. Or imagine if Alabama football suddenly became the Southeastern Heritage Athletic Collective and expected boosters to shrug indifferently at the transition. Such arguments would be laughed out of the room before the speaker reached the second sentence. Yet a version of that kind of logic is now being presented here with a straight face.

What makes the story particularly fascinating, however, isn’t merely the money. It’s the personnel.

Every political scandal, corporate meltdown, or institutional fiasco eventually develops a recurring cast of characters. The names change locations, but somehow remain near the action. The final years of the Wayne LaPierre era produced a seemingly endless parade of governance controversies, lawsuits, boardroom disputes, spending scandals, and public embarrassments. NRA members spent years demanding reform and they voted accordingly. They replaced directors. They rejected entrenched factions. Many believed the organization was finally beginning to emerge from one of the darkest chapters in its history.

Then, in a plot twist that feels less like nonprofit governance and more like a low-budget sequel nobody wanted, many of the same figures associated with The Troubles suddenly appeared in leadership roles at the newly rebranded foundation. It’s like spending years removing termites from your home only to discover they’ve incorporated as a property management company next door.

Of course, defenders will insist this is all just a coincidence. Perhaps it’s merely happenstance that so many familiar names continue appearing whenever the money is. Perhaps it means nothing at all. Then again, perhaps Elvis Presley currently operates a fly-fishing guide service in northern Arkansas. At a certain point skepticism ceases to be cynicism and becomes basic pattern recognition.

The larger issue remains donor trust. Every nonprofit in America speaks reverently about donor intent until donor intent becomes inconvenient. At that point entire battalions of lawyers emerge from the mists carrying binders, bylaws, memoranda, and legal theories explaining why what donors thought they were supporting may not be what they were actually supporting. Forests are sacrificed to produce explanatory documents. Consultants are retained. Definitions become surprisingly flexible.

But ordinary donors tend to think in simpler terms. If they attended a Friends of the NRA banquet, bought auction items, purchased raffle tickets, and wrote checks because they believed they were supporting NRA-related charitable programs, then they naturally assume the money should continue to serve the mission represented by the NRA. That isn’t a radical legal theory, it’s common sense.

Which brings us to the question nobody involved in this mess seems eager to answer directly: if the NRA name generated the goodwill, inspired the donations, recruited the volunteers, filled the banquet halls, and built the fundraising network, who has the stronger moral claim to the resulting (substantial) assets—the institution whose name created the value, or the people attempting to hang onto control of it after abandoning the identity that produced it?

Courts will eventually wrestle with the legal aspects of that question. Judges will parse documents, bylaws, restrictions, and charitable trust doctrines. But there’s another court already in session consisting of the millions of donors whose contributions built the Foundation in the first place. Their verdict may ultimately matter more. Trust, once squandered, is far harder to recover than money.

That’s why transparency isn’t optional. Donors deserve a full accounting. They deserve to know how the funds were raised, what promises were made, how donor intent is being interpreted, and why assets accumulated under the NRA banner should remain under the control of an organization that now appears eager to distance itself from that banner. Most of all, they deserve an answer to a question so obvious it shouldn’t require litigation to resolve:

If the NRA name was valuable enough to raise the money, why isn’t it valuable enough to keep control of it?

Until that question is convincingly answered, many supporters may conclude that the only thing disappearing faster than the NRA Foundation’s old name is the credibility of the people attempting to replace it.

 

Chris Dorsey is a 30-year media veteran and founding partner of Dorsey Pictures.