St. Lawrence County and the surrounding area saw the least amount of donations -- less than 11 percent -- go to charities that were garnered by for-profit telemarketing fundraisers in 2013, according to Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s Office.

The Central New York and Western Adirondacks region, which includes St. Lawrence County, saw $853,312.56 raised through for-profit telemarketing fundraisers in 2013. Of that, $91,807.55, or 10.8 percent, actually went to charitable causes, according to the comptroller’s “Pennies for Charity” report.

Telemarketers registered in New York reported raising more than $302 million for charity in 2013, a 20 percent increase over the previous year and the most ever reported in the report’s 12-year history. Of those funds, $146.5 million went to organizations’ charitable missions, about 48 percent of the total money raised. In 75 percent of the fundraising campaigns run by telemarketers, the charities retained less than 50 percent of the funds raised, Schneiderman said.

At 48 percent, the share of funds raised by for-profit telemarketers that went to charity in 2013 increased significantly in comparison to 2012, when only 37 percent of the funds raised went to the charitable missions donors intended to support, Schneiderman said.

The report aggregates information from fundraising reports filed with the Attorney General’s Charities Bureau for telemarketing campaigns conducted in the previous year, according to Schneiderman.

“New Yorkers who are generous enough to donate their hard-earned money to charity deserve to know how that money is really spent, including how much is used to pay for-profit telemarketers,” Schneiderman said. “Our Pennies for Charity report is an important tool for transparency because it informs the donating public what portion of their charitable contributions made through telemarketers went to the outside fundraisers, and how much was left to support charitable programs.”

Despite improvements in the share of funds going to charitable purposes, telemarketing remains an expensive and intrusive method of raising funds for charity, and suffers from significant limitations compared to other forms of fundraising, Schneiderman said in a prepared statement.

The Attorney General says it encourages so-called “me-too” charities, which sound like respected and effective charities, but are much less effective. For example, the well-known “Make-a-Wish Foundations” and the me-too “Kids Wish Network.”

Schneiderman says largely anonymous interaction between telemarketer staff, located at a remote call center, and the call recipient is difficult to detail after the fact, making policing or proof of misrepresentation difficult.

Many charities fail to actively monitor the fundraisers they engage and hold them accountable. The Attorney General has found a number of fundraisers with significant histories of violations who continue to secure fundraising contracts, seemingly with little board oversight or involvement. For example, InfoCision, Inc., which has voluntary assurance agreements with multiple states arising out of their improper conduct, and recently settled a class action misrepresentation suit, had 41 contracts filed with the Office of the Attorney General, and kept 66 percent of the proceeds of its fundraising activity, Schneiderman said.