an open letter to Habitat for Humanity

[cellio]

Dear Habitat for Humanity,

I helped you build a house once, and later gave you money. You spent far in excess of that donation sending me solicitations, making me less inclined to send you more. (I know other charities that use their money more wisely.) Then you started sending me spam and ignored cease-and-desist notices. I used your next postage-paid envelope to send a final cease-and-desist on the spam thing, and that didn't work either. You went onto my "do not donate, ever" list.

And today you called and were irritated that I considered this a problem. The proper response to "your policies have led me to re-evaluate and I do not want to hear from you" is not "but we do all this good work!" but, rather, "I'm sorry" followed by either "I'll take you off all our lists" or "how can we make things right?". I have now directed you not to call me and I'm sure it's been 18 months since I sent you any money (which is the timeout on the do-not-call law). If you call me again I will invoke the attorney general. If you want to set matters right, you must send me a physical letter (not email, not a phone call) actually addressing my complaints. Have a nice day.

Comments

[alaricmacconnal.livejournal.com]

You too, huh. Luckily they don't have my email address but they've started calling. Bah!

[cellio]

I just wish I knew how to reach someone there who gives a damn. Even if they stop pestering me (not that I'm holding out hopes), that they do it to others makes them equally unworthy of support. I guess they don't care about retention so long as they can keep bringing in people who don't know their ways (or who are guilted into making donations on the phone, or who don't care).

[http://users.livejournal.com/merle_/]

You spent far in excess of that donation sending me solicitations, making me less inclined to send you more.

I've had this problem with a lot of charities (and just about every PBS station.. really, $15 did not pay for ten years of weekly mailings!). It is hard to believe that they cannot get the message that they are wasting so much money.

This year (well, 2009, I guess) I took the approach of giving no money to anyone. If they have not sent more than three letters begging by the end of this month I'm doubling what I sent them in 2008. It seems like a fair policy, and makes up for last year. (if they did send more letters.. well, it depends on how often and how much I'd sent them, because a few $hundred can pay for a lot of envelopes with quite a bit left over)

[cellio]

I've dropped charities because of the amount of mail they send, but until it gets egregious (which causes me to start keeping records), I haven't been methodical about it. Your approach is an interesting one; thanks for sharing.

[fauxklore]

I've given up donating to several organizations precisely because of the volume of junk mail they've sent. I generally consider one a quarter reasonable. Organizations that send multiple begging letters the same week automatically go onto my "do not donate" list.

In general, I've shifted my charity strategy to give more money to fewer organizations over the years. It seems that the number of solicitations has often been inversely related to the size of the donation, which makes the offenders all the more offensive.

[cellio]

I've been making the same kind of shift too, over 10-15 years. It's amazing that I still hear from the ones who dropped out in the first round!

[loosecanon.livejournal.com]

It also drives me nuts to see a charity I have contributed to spending that funding to support televised programming, concerts, and other entertainments. Even if I like the entertainments.

[cellio]

Oh my. That's a new one on me. How irritating! Talk about not fulfilling the charter for which you solicited the donations... sheesh.

[laurabee.livejournal.com]

Wow, that sucks. The Habitat for Humanity I worked for sends me their newsletter and had an option to get it as a PDF instead to save on postage costs. I think that's the Beaver County one.

It's Penn Environment I can't get to stop sending me physical mail. *rolls eyes*

[cellio]

An environmental group sends you excessive physical mail? *snort* (Those guys come to my door once a year, ostensibly with a petition but that's just to start the conversation that leads to the request for donations. But they don't send me stuff.)

Your Habitat sounds much more clueful than whichever one I've been hearing from. I hadn't actually realized that they operated independently; I assumed the mailings and calls were coming from some central office.

[egoldberg.livejournal.com]

I hate it when non-profits do this, too. I once donated $50 to Red Cross after my house burnt down...and got at least $50 worth of donation mailings.

Now I am very targeted and work w/the donations coordinator of smaller (<$3 mil budget) organizations and make sure the money goes to a specific purpose (e.g. "paying lawyers on project") and that no mailings will result.

[egoldberg.livejournal.com]

(admittedly it also meant bumping each donation to about $500 or so post-matching, so that I knew it was worth a small bit of their time to make me happy)

[cellio]

Yeah, the guys who don't understand "one-time donation under special circumstances" can get annoying too, like when I sponsored a friend's kid in some fundraising-for-charity effort for a charity that's perfectly fine but wouldn't be on my normal rounds otherwise. My mistake was making the donation via a check that had my address on it. The Red Cross has sent me a lot of junk mail in the past too, so I now make my disaster-relief donations through other channels. (The donation for Haiti went via my religious organization; they already have my address and treat it with respect.)

[nsingman.livejournal.com]

What a nuisance! I hope your clue-by-four struck home.

[cellio]

I doubt anyone's listening, sadly. The people they hire to make phone calls don't; it's just a job to them. And apparently no one at the donation-processing center reads letters. I don't know what else to do except send my complaint out into the Google-indexed ether...

[dragonazure.livejournal.com]

ealdthryth and I have gotten irked with their aggressive paper campaign in years past. She got us off their mailing list, so we are happier about them not wasting money trying to get money from us. In spite of that relatively minor irritation, I am still happy to go out to the project sites to swing a hammer, wield saws, and whatever else I can do to build those houses.

[cellio]

Hey lookie, today's mail brought a solicitation with a postage-paid envelope. I wonder what I should put in it, besides a print-out of this entry. (Yes, the waste bothers me, but nothing else has gotten them to stop bothering me.)