Inflating fundraising totals — what’s ethical?

Hi everyone,

I work for a large medical healthy system and each year we hold a fundraiser raising close to $1M for pediatric cancer. The team in charge of the fundraiser often uses gifts that were made previously to artificially inflate the grand total raised. These are gifts made well in advance and had nothing to do with the event.

I’m not new to fundraising so I know this type of thing happens, but it really makes me feel uneasy. To me, it’s one thing to solicit a gift months in advance if the donor knows that it’s going toward the event fund. It’s a completely different thing to just take any gift made to pediatric and repurpose it for the sake of the event total.

What do you all think? Am I off here?