Plea for charities to end onslaught of extra requests
Cheap bribery is wasteful, irritating for existing donors, says George Brookman.
Like millions of Canadians, I receive almost daily requests from a wide variety of charities for donations on a year-round basis.
Some of these charities are close to my heart and others I may not have heard of. Generally, I have no doubt they are all worthwhile and are touching the lives of many people and abused animals. Truly, Canadians are extremely generous with their charitable dollars even in these difficult times. While the level of individual giving has gone down, I understand that the number of people contributing to charitable organizations has remained steady or even increased.
Lately, however, I have noticed a disturbing trend of grossly inefficient, wasteful and annoying promotions from some of the larger charities. Money is being wasted on silly promotional items, from nickels glued to request envelopes to cheap pens. My particular frustration is printed materials, such as Christmas cards, that no one would send or receive, or notepads with my name printed on them and patterned with flowers or butterflies or other images totally unsuited to my personality. All of these go into the wastebasket, except the nickels, of course, which I carefully peel off and add to the change in my pocket!
What is so irritating is that these requests keep on flowing no matter how recently or how often you have made a donation. These charities just keep on spending on promotions even within days of when a donation has already been mailed. In one example, I make a donation to a certain major charity twice a year, as I have done for many years. Even the most basic computer program could tell them this is the pattern. In spite of this, almost weekly, I receive additional requests for funds and they often come with a silly gift inside.
But the kicker for me is that after making a donation, after throwing away an onslaught of
I reject being bribed with nickels, cheap pens, bad greeting cards or poorquality notepads not worthy of the ink in my pen.
requests, after quelling my anger at the waste of money, there is inevitably the Donor Confirmation Request, which is nothing more than a request that says, “Hey, you seem to be ignoring our other requests, so we just want to poke you to make sure you have not died or moved away.” All of this is nothing more than a veiled way to ask again and again for more money.
Political parties are even worse. At this moment, there are almost daily telephone calls that start off with shallow, phoney and irritating words, such as, “We so want to thank you for your past generous contribution, but you know that there is an election coming and we need to have all the money we can to fight the good fight.” These calls come on a regular basis no matter whether you have donated recently, donated at some point or never donated to that party at all.
Aside from feeling that far too much of my donations seem to be directed toward the costs of printing, buying cheap pens, obtaining nickels and mailing millions of envelopes, it is the incredibly amateurish manner that these campaigns are handled that I find truly offensive. More and more, I am making the decision that any organization that spends money harassing their already committed donors is simply too disorganized to be worthy of receiving my contributions. I look for charities with very low administrative expenses and reject those where the cost of raising funds is far out of proportion to the funds generated.
I reject being bribed with nickels, cheap pens, bad greeting cards or poor-quality notepads not worthy of the ink in my pen. Someone has to draw the line on this nonsense, and I urge everyone to think twice when making those precious donations and take the time to make sure that, whether you are giving $5 or $5,000, you are confident that the money is actually going to do some good and not just line the pockets of some tacky promotional marketing organizations.
My time and my contributions cannot be bought with a nickel!