Charity Rant

[jducoeur]

Yes, I know that you're a good cause -- I wouldn't have sent money to you otherwise. But when you construe that donation as a "membership", and imply that I am therefore somehow obligated to follow it up with the same amount (or, preferably, more) next year, that does nothing to endear your cause to me. And when you begin to send me monthly notices about the latest Urgent Crisis that requires more money from me, I will start to throw out your mail unopened. There are plenty of other deserving charities out there, and some of them are significantly less annoying than you.

(The worst thing about the above is that it applies equally well to a couple *dozen* organizations that are postal-spamming me, effectively colluding to make me thoroughly cynical about the whole concept. When 3/4 of my mail is charities dunning me for cash, it just gets tiresome. Bloody tragedy of the commons...)

Comments

[tpau]

i have stopped givign to places that send me spam...

[dagonell.livejournal.com]

What I *really* dislike is when they label next year's contribution as your "bill" for "membership". Dude, *I'll* decide what's a bill and what's a donation.
-- Dagonell

[tafkad.livejournal.com]

Public Radio is my favorite.

One year, when I told them I wasn't going to send them an out-of-cycle donation, the woman said, "I understand. These are pretty hard times for us all." That's when I snapped and told her that they had just received the largest IN-CYCLE donation I'd ever given them, about a month before this call.

Last year (maybe the year before), I was barraged with calls for an out-of-cycle donation. The last one was while I was on the Metro. The other people in my immediate area heard, "FOR THE ***SIXTH*** TIME, YOU ARE NOT GETTING A PENNY FROM ME UNTIL PLEDGE WEEK! STOP CALLING!" There was much laughter, presumably laughter of familiarity.

NPR

[metageek.livejournal.com]

What I really don't understand is the public radio stations that keep bugging me even after I've moved away. It's been four years since I left Philadelphia, and I still get snailspam from them. Apparently, they go to the effort of tracking address changes, but don't bother to filter out people whose new addresses are hundreds of miles away.

[oakleaf-mirror.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I hate that, and have stopped donating to some organizations for just that reason. I've even written and suggested that I thought I was giving money to a worthy cause, but was concerned with the percentage of my donation that had been spent in sending me followup requests, which I didn't think was a worthwhile use of my original contribution.

[lakshmi-amman.livejournal.com]

Wow, I totally empathisize - my very first donation (I had recently graduated) was to Pride. They then called me 3 times in 1 month, each time I asked to be removed from their calling list. Last time I threatened legal action.

Now it's surveys. I took a couple, in fits of being flattered at being asked. Now they are surveying me once a week or more. I'm gonna have to ask to be removed.

It seems a matter of degrees - one polite call or thank you note a year would be well-recieved. 10 such a week becomes overwhelming.

[cellio]

Not only are they annoying, but they're chewing up the money that should have been going to the cause itself and spending it on postal spam instead. I pipe the stuff to /dev/null and don't repeat the mistake of contributing to them. I've found that for every class of charity out there, there are bunches of competing players. So if I want to give money to $cause and $charity_in_cause has annoyed me, I'll just give it to a different organization instead. Once you're on the mailing list you hear from them anyway, so I don't have to look for 'em -- just wait for something to show up and then do due dilligence on the new guys.

Negative donations

[metageek.livejournal.com]

Some people use this effect as a weapon. One guy on Irregular Times has mentioned a couple of times that his $10 donation to the Republican Party has wound up costing them more than $10.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Amen.

Interesting side note: Small Dog Electronics lets you make donations through their website, as if they were a product. They (a) match the amount, to a yearly cap, and (b) since it's them making the donations and not you, you don't get spam from the companies. More details here. Imagine if, say, Amazon picked this up...

(And yes, I trust Small Dog -- specifically, them, not companies in general -- to actually be making the donations.)

[tafkad.livejournal.com]

Actually, Amazon has done this in the past, at least once. They accepted donations for the tsunami relief effort.

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

I suggested to Amazon that they consider putting charities on their site, so that I could put charity donations in my Wish List. Didn't hear anything substantive back, but you never know.

[keshwyn]

No kidding.

Also, when it -is- a membership (Sierra Club, for example, is a membership qualifies you to go on some of their cool trips), telling me that it's going to expire SOON when it's six months from expiring? Not cool.

Selling my name to other groups? Double-plus uncool. I had words with them over that one.

On the other hand, they don't call me for cash, which is nice. They do listen about that.

[matildalucet.livejournal.com]

I've been told that the reasons for sending renewal notices six months in advance (at least for magazines) include allowing for general procrastination and a few of the notices to get lost (have they seen my desk?), and to improve cash flow for the company. I don't like it, I've never liked it, I tried to limit it when I was with GWS. But it is quite hard to argue with statistics that show that it is a profitable technique.

The perils of membership

[chiefoperator.livejournal.com]

I was always pretty laid-back about people who try to count me as a member just because I contributed; I can see why they do it, and it didn't seem like it hurt anything. Then one day I got an Urgent Request from a cause that wanted some extra bucks to fight some case in court, and to try to shake the tree a little they included some remark like "..and you, as a Member, might even be considered partially liable!" Oh, that got my attention all right! Now I'm VERY touchy about it...