Unsolicited "gifts" from charities
I should be resigned to this by now, but it still irritates me. I keep getting mailings from charities with an enclosure of some cheap thing I do not need. They suggest how much money I should send them. Attempted extortion is too strong a term, but it approaches that.
I never respond to them. I give to charities whose work I am familiar with and know that they deserve support. I have all the calendars and notepads I need. What am I supposed to do with this stuff?
I never respond to them. I give to charities whose work I am familiar with and know that they deserve support. I have all the calendars and notepads I need. What am I supposed to do with this stuff?
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I keep the pens and use the notelets, and never give to any charity that wastes money in this way.
Most of the ones I used to get were return address labels. I doubt that charity shops wanted labels with my name and address.
I just started sending them back their reply forms, asking politely to be taken off their lists. I've done the same thing with mail order catalogues. Both have been successful. I'm sure I've saved several acres of trees.
I find a use for all these items, though perhaps it would be better for my £££ to be entirely spent on The Cause(s). However, I suspect that, in a very competitive field, the charities concerned do need to lay out a fair amount of cash on publicity, paying their staff, and so on...
Re 'mail refused', I think the practice in Ukland is to scrawl 'RTS' (Return To Sender) in massive letters on the unwanted envelope, duly posting it in a Proper Post-Office Red Pillar Box.
Added to my opt-outs of charity solicitations and catalogues (above), I also need to add political candidates and causes. I've made a few donations this year -- cue the avalanche of appeals! I send each one back with a note that I will donate when and if I am able, but that I do NOT respond to solicitations. It's slowed down (except for the emails, which are easy to delete if I don't want to respond), but I fear that in the next 11 months they'll pick up again. (Telephone solicitors do not get their calls answered, and their numbers are blocked immediately.)
I use the things if I can, have a pang of guilt but move on.
It does feel like extortion. Especially as they must know they will get 90% rejection and (presumably) still make money.
(Though they have been sending me things and getting no return for years before GDPR.)
Wouldn't this knock out a lot of the effectiveness of the technique? I might respond to a begging letter starting 'Dear Mr Cat', but wouldn't find 'Dear Householder' anything like so engaging. And if it just falls through the letterbox with the takeaway menus, discount offers from Farm Foods and so on, it will just go in the recycling along with the rest of that sort of thing.
Yes, I received some stuff from them (here in the UK) many lustra ago. Perhaps they're defunct, as a charity, anyway.
Some eB*y sellers invite donations (via P*yP*l), and I have occasionally obliged, if I've agreed with whatever cause it is they're supporting. But that, of course, is done impersonally online, so no feelings of guilt-in-public, IYSWIM!
I've had a lot of envelopes lately, but nothing with gifts in. Fortunately. And most of them do not have windows in, so its easy to put them in recycling.
Glad to hear (IYSWIM) that they're still going. A worthy cause, albeit just one amidst a clamouring multitude...
...which will grow ever bigger, and more clamourous, as the world darkens, and the fascisti oppress the poor even more...
I live in a small rural town and our local grocery store does just that, but it is for our local schools, science camp, sober grad night and such. As these kids are our home town children it gives the idea a whole different take, so I am happy to round up when I can. It always sometimes happens if a local family needs help because their home burned or some such tragedy.
Why am I, as taxpayer, supporting both my local school district's fight AGAINST some student's struggle to secure a free appropriate public education while also morally committed to contributing to the family's considerable legal costs in their efforts to gain what should be theirs by right? I do not want to pay to support both sides when I strongly disagree with one of them!
I got one final piece of mail from them. It was an apology.
(I've noticed in recent years that said envelopes tend to be severely limited in the amount of weight they'll cover,)
My stepfather, a mailman, was in the habit of balling up the day's junkmail and shoving it into such envelopes, which he then sealed and mailed back. Once he received a free camera in reply.
I currently have four 2020 calendars and all the note pads and Christmas cards I'll ever need and I never fill compelled to send those charities money.
My son gets stacks of mail from charities every single day due to his soft heart for animals and brown eyed children, I enjoy handing it over and telling him the chickens want more money. Or the potbellied pigs. Many charities remind him that he can include them in his will.
I tell all the phone callers that I do not give to charities that solicit over the phone. I consider myself very brave for saying that to the guy who sounds like Broderick Crawford and asks for money for our brave police force.
OTOH I'll never be brave enough to suggest that my church have an annual drive for some disease other than the same one they push every year.
How about replying, "I'll show my support by voting for the party which will fund our police/ambulance/whatever properly"?
My wife and I refer to all such post as "emotional blackmail" and put it in the recycling.
The older I get, the more I am inclined to think that Communism is not, in itself, a Bad Idea.
But I don’t condemn charities that don’t receive enough to fulfill their mission otherwise for doing either.
They spend pence in order to receive pounds. Charities have to spend money to get money, there is no way around this. And they have to appeal to emotion, because it works where other things don’t.
I no longer get angry at legitimate charities creating small annoyances to try to get whatever they can to fill their need, I save that for the fact that the need exists.
Many years ago I decided that I would never give out of guilt and never give anything that actually cost me nothing.
Which I do find quite challenging as I step over beggars and around people who seem to be trying to look pathetic for change.
I suppose it is a sign of the times that almost everyone now engages in similar kinds of marketing, even beggars in the street.
But there is a deeper malaise, I think, in my society which this taps into. I'm not sure if I can define or articulate it precisely, but somehow people are motivated by the the idea of "doing something" when faced with the knowledge of a certain issue.
It is almost as if we are so switched on to the messages we receive from the environment around us that we automatically feel the need to respond, even if the response makes little or no difference to that issue, because somehow it is better to do something than nothing.
--
One of the biggest charities in the UK is a donkey sanctuary.
I've nothing against donkeys, but how have we got to the situation where the plight of bedraggled donkeys affects more donors than almost anything else?
I don't think there is much point in getting angry, but I think there is at some point value is stepping back and wondering whether the complex structures that the marketing departments of charities use are actually worth it.
I used to work in charity retail. I've had a lot of conversations about the mechanics of how the economics of it works - but the hard reality of almost all charities is that most charity shops make little money. Some even lose money.
Many charities would make the same (or perhaps more) money by collecting and selling goods on the wholesale market (for "pence in the pound") than they do via their networks of shops, once all the costs are considered.
It is a fairly well-known reality that some charity shop chains are actually more in the business of encouraging donations (particularly in wills etc) from the mostly elderly volunteers who work there than anything they actually sell.
One well-known national charity makes a marginal amount of money from the shops and openly states that their main purpose is "brand recognition".
It is hard not to get cynical in the charity retail sector, and to avoid coming to the conclusion that there are easier and more efficient ways to make money.
Charity Navigator helps us make good decisions as well as charts showing things like "number of people with disease X," next to how much is collected for that cause. Every disease is awful if you've got it but if a certain disease is suddenly getting lots of money from big celebrity concerts while others are ignored year after year in spite of it effecting a huge part of the population -- that's something to think about.
Still. If donkeys or chickens happen to push your buttons might as well go with that. I think it's good for us to give no matter who or what's on the other end.
I was just thinking "that must be Open Doors, then". No actual unsolicited "gifts", but begging email, beginning "Dear Eutychus", to an address I'm sure I didn't have registered with them. For all the paranoia they exhibit about protecting persecuted Christians, they don't seem to have any scruples when it comes to spamming potential donors
But on the other hand, asking you for it in front of the cashier and other people standing in line... It's like a public proposal. "This is all so sudden! I don't know what to say! Can we ... go somewhere to talk about this privately?"
I'm totally against the cash register "donate to the store's charity". This is attempted purchase of public licence.
I'd say the key is to learn to be asocial in a social situation. They are trying to get you to feel something, but your feelings are your's and I view it as wrong of them to try to manipulate my feelings. I have given no permission for them to do this. I'm justifiably upset with them for doing so. And non-responsive to their attempts to pull feelings from me.
Giving based on guilt leverages legalism. 2 Corinthians 9:7 says "Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver" (New Living Translation).
I often wonder what the landscape of Christian missions and charities would look like if it were somehow possible to cease legalistic guilt-motivated giving and replace it with grace-motivated giving.
Most of them would go instantly bankrupt. Be careful what you wish for.
Those in need love a giver, regardless of motivation.
Sanctimonious bollocks. People in need are perfectly capable of being ungrateful, or of feeling patronised or insulted by a giver. People in need have been known to refuse gifts where the giver is seeking to use it to polish the turd that is their own reputation.
I think there is plenty of evidence of charitable organisations who have lost sight of the actual aims that they were set up for and are engaged in activities which amount to little more than keeping themselves going and their people employed.
Unfortunately all kinds of imaginative propaganda often obscures the truth, and inbuilt inertia within those charities (and sometimes within the society at large) means that difficult discussions about the ethics are never properly aired on public.
Brand is huge. Branding works. And, yes, cynicism is a problem.
Boy this goes against 2000 years of Christian teachings. So instead of giving money, you would have people with families, and who work 50 hours a week, do what? volunteer at a food bank? What about a single mom, she just doesn't get to be charitable at all? Absurd.