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

[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.