My husband and I try to make some sort of charitable donations each year, both out of a desire to help certain causes and as a way to reduce our taxable incomes. In the past, we really wanted to help out organizations like the Daily Food Bank or the Red Cross. Here is the problem with these charities. Once you donate to them for the first time, they are relentless in their frequency of soliciting for more donations and there seems to be no easy way to opt out of these requests. If the charities had just let us donate regularly on our own timeframes, we would have gladly continued to support them each year. But we felt so harassed by the constant bombardment of appeals via email and snail mail (the Red Cross would send unwanted “gifts” to prompt donations) that we no longer include them for consideration when we decide on our annual donation recipients.
At least we don’t receive phone calls anymore. In the past when we had a land line, we used to receive a phone call every evening around dinner time from my old University asking for donations. This became so annoying that once we canceled our land lines, we never give out our cell numbers unless absolutely necessary and block unknown callers so our phones don’t ring unless the numbers are in our contact lists.
I don’t understand why charities think that this type of aggressive solicitation is effective. Perhaps it does work with some people but for us, it led to the opposite result. After a long period of ignoring the onslaught of requests, automatically pumping emails to junk and tossing physical mail, we seem to finally be off their lists. As much as we do want to support these charities, we cannot subject ourselves to these tactics again. Now we give to other charities that accept our donations and don’t immediately and incessantly ask for more.
