Where do you draw the line? When it comes to raising money, do you let ethics overrule revenue?

It seems ethics policies are everywhere; professional fundraising associations, like the Association of Fundraising Professionals, require members to agree to theirs, and the Donor Bill of Rights has been around for years.

One think tank in the United Kingdom is undertaking a serious research effort to define ethics in an actionable way. Rogare, part of the University of Plymouth Hartsook Centre for Sustainable Philanthropy, recently published a white paper entitled, “Rights Stuff: Fundraising’s Ethics Gap and a New Theory of Fundraising Ethics.” It’s a first attempt to explore a new way of viewing ethics as a fundraiser. It’s heavy reading, but it will get you thinking about ethics and how you apply it to the work you do.

Fundraising has been the media’s “whipping boy” for years. On a slow news day, there is nothing better than to release an article on how a charity overpays its staff, over solicits its donors and overpromises on results. Even Saturday Night Live had some fun with charity abuses with this parody. Make no mistake – there are some bad nonprofit organizations and some horrible examples of fundraising abuse.

But there are amazing things as a result of the 99.9 percent of fundraising that is ethical and actually contributing to making the world a better place. Nonprofit organizations employ 1 in 10 American workers. One in 6 hospital beds in the United States is part of the Catholic health network. The number of people spending the night in a homeless shelter or eating a meal provided by a nonprofit organization is in the hundreds of thousands.

Nonprofit work is big business. But it’s fueled by donations, large and small. We have an obligation to those donors to keep to the high ground when it comes to ethics. As Publilius Syrus, a Latin writer, said in the first century B.C., “What is left when honor is lost?”