A charity may want your name more than your money. It can benefit more from the sale or rental of donor lists than it can from a small donation. So unless you want contact from an endless stream of non-profit organizations, be a selective donor.
- Make an annual charitable giving budget.
- Select the specific charities you want to support.
- Give to those charities generously, but refrain from donations to any others.
If you follow those guidelines, you’ll become a more valuable donor to the charities that matter most to you and reduce unwanted mail from others.
Unless you specifically request otherwise, all the charities you support are likely to share your name and address. To prevent that, ask any charity you support to respect your privacy. When you make your donation, include a note explaining that you do not want your name sold, rented or exchanged. You may even want to warn the charity that you stop supporting it if it ignores your request.
If you can, use a unique middle initial or a slightly altered spelling of your first name with each charity you support. This will allow you to track unwanted solicitations: you’ll be able to determine what organization sold your name based on the way your name is spelled.
When you receive unsolicited requests for donations, write the charity directly and ask to have your name removed from its mailing lists. Include the address label from the mail it sent you so it can track the list from which it obtained your name.
Don’t bother with the old strategy of dropping solicitations from unfamiliar charities back in the mail, with “return to sender” scrawled on the envelope. Most charities use nonprofit postal rates, which only cover delivery one way–from the charity to your home. Unless you add additional postage, the letter will not be returned to the charity. It will just be discarded at the Post Office.
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1 Consumer Wants Nonprofits to Treat Her Charitably | Just Ask Asa Aarons // May 31, 2008 at 9:23 pm
[…] Pleas for Charitable Donations Confuse Consumers How to Stop Charities from Asking for Money […]
2 Tim // Sep 29, 2008 at 1:41 pm
I happen to be one of the owners of MyJunkTree and as a new company I search the web to see if we are getting any visibility out there and I post n relevant Blogs.
We launched the company because we were tired of all the junk mail we were receiving and we personally did not want to bounce all over the web to contact all the different companies to stop it all. First and foremost we wanted to let people choose what they wanted to let come to their home knowing that some people really do like some of the coupons and catalogs. So our clients choose what they want stopped.
We also had to provide a service that is different than the other services out there, so here is what we offer:
1. We have a database of over 1300 catalogs that you can choose to stop.
2. We have over a 5700 charities/Non-Profits that you can stop solicitations from.
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7. You can register on the National Do Not Call Registry from the website.
8. You can order your no strings attached free annual credit report right from the website.
9. We plant trees with every new membership.
And, yes we are a paid service and yes you can do everything that we do for free, if you want to do all the research and spend the time contacting the companies yourself it can easily be done. We have just done all of the legwork for our clients and feel there is value in the service we provide. So check out MyJunkTree and make difference in your mailbox.
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