I received a letter today from the Pam Morgan, President/CEO of the Better Business Bureau of Northern Nevada, an organization that my company has belonged to since 1989 - and has maintained an excellent track record, I might add. This is the second letter I have received from them in the last couple of years on the same topic, and one that I believe demonstrates clearly that the BBB does not necessarily provide what it claims to provide its members: the right to promote the fact that they belong to the BBB. The issue is regarding the limitations the BBB places on PAYING MEMBERS regarding links to the BBB website (which you would wrongly assume they would actually encourage) or use of BBB logos.
Last year, the letter I received came from the national headquarters for the BBB. It seems that they were upset that, even though we have paid our membership fees for over 15 years - and paid ADDITIONALLY to participate in the BBB Online program - they didn't want us to actually tell anybody on our website that we were members of the organization. They threatened to revoke our membership unless we quit using the BBB logo on our website - which was located in a section on "affiliations" that included links to the Reno-Sparks Chamber of Commerce, the National Federation for Independant Business, among others.
I responded to their letter by firing off a letter of my own, complaining that if anybody else did what the BBB was doing, i.e. selling a service, and then preventing the purchaser from actually USING it, they would be all over that company as scam artists. Yet that is exactly what the BBB was doing to me. I had paid to belong to an organization that represents to the world a higher set of ethical standards, but they did not want us to actually tell people about it on our website. What good is our membership then? Basically, I told them to pound sand. Well, I never heard back from them.
Until today. In today's letter, they are complaining that our website uses an unauthorized logo in a link to their own website that pops up my companies information as provided by the BBB. The "unauthorized logo" is, in fact, the official BBB logo - of which my company is a member. Why do they have to hassle their own members with this inane garbage? I am going to give the letter to my web guy, so he can change to the "authorized logo", but for the second time in two years, I am left to wonder exactly what it is that I am paying them for.
