At the beginning of 2010, there was a horrible earthquake in Haiti. For various reasons, I decided to donate some money and ended up choosing Habitat for Humanity as a recipient. And then began a solicitation campaign that bordered on harassment: emails at least once a week, paper mailings multiple times a month (almost every week). In time, I began getting solicitations from other non-profits that I hadn’t yet heard of – so I can only imagine Habitat for Humanity had sold/shared my info with their partners.
I care deeply about the environment and I abhor waste. When organizations that I’m not interested in use valuable resources printing out materials and mailing it to me, it bothers me. A lot. It wastes my time and wastes resources (in a world where we’re using resources much faster than they’re being renewed and where everyone’s attention is under near-constant bombardment by the advertising industry).
I also get a lot of emails, most of which I care about. I didn’t immediately unsubscribe to the Habitat for Humanity emails because they were giving updates about Haiti in addition to soliciting more money, but once I realized how frequently they were sending them, I used the automatic unsubscribe feature. Next week, another email solicitation from them. I deleted that and figured maybe it was a glitch in their system, but the next week, I got another. So I used the automatic unsubscribe feature again. That time, it worked.
Then came time to deal with the paper mails, which I’d been dutifully recycling for a few months. I don’t like waiting on the phone (especially during busy weekdays), so I used the contact feature on their website to ask them to remove me from their mailing list. I was pleased to get a response within one business day informing me that I’d been removed, but with the standard disclaimer about getting a few more mailings because some may already be in processing. Being technically competent, I’m not sure why this is so, because it ought to be the case that mailing processing does a mail merge with real-time data (i.e., the only mailings I should get are the ones already physically in the mail system), but whatever. I did the same for a few other organizations that had started mailing me out of the blue (same response).
A month went by and I kept receiving Habitat for Humanity mailings. Two months went by, still receiving. Three, four, five and then they sent me a large packet with Christmas cards and I knew they weren’t ever going to stop. So I contacted them again, a bit more forecefully this time. Same reply as before. We’ll see if I actually get removed this time.
At this point, I estimate that Habitat for Humanity has spent at least 10$ specifically on paper mailings to me (including the Christmas cards, return address labels and dozens of other junk mails) and that excludes the waste of mailings by the other organizations they sold/shared my address with and it doesn’t account for normal administration/marketing costs.
My question now is, “Is it worth it to donate small amounts to any non-profit?” If they all respond like Habitat for Humanity, then no. Even if I donated the same amount annually, at least 10% of that amount is wasted on harasssing me, and probablyanother 10-20% on other administrative/marketing costs. And if I only donate for special occasions (less than annually), then the cost of mailings to me specifically will, over time, outweigh the donation I made, resulting in a net loss for the charity I intended to support.
Pretty much any time I donate to a new non-profit, I start receiving mailings from that non-profit and from others, then I have to go through the hullabaloo of asking each to remove me from their mailing lists. None so far have been as aggressive as Habitat for Humanity, but all have been annoying. I’ve heard that charities generally lose about 10% to administrative costs, but I’m wondering if for larger organizations that isn’t closer to 50% – they are self-sustaining juggernauts and it seems most of their effort is based in self-promotion/marketing rather than in providing charitable services.
My contribution, any contribution, to a non-profit like this (one that aggressively solicits and self-promotes) is implicitly supporting the advertising industry, which is helping to destroy our planet by using unsustainable amounts of raw materials and energy to manipulate us into spending more money (often by making us feel bad). I think I’d rather keep my dollars and emotional well-being.
