Give Till It Hurts...

A good 75 per cent of our mail is junk mail. Junk mail, I am sad to say, from charitable organizations, competing for our charitable donation dollars.
Once, a few years ago, my husband gave something to one or two of these organizations he happened to think deserved to get some help and, since then, we have been inundated with mail from one of the many groups in North America which have charitable organization status. The list has grown with each year, too. It seems endless. Not a day goes by without one or another of their pleas for funds filling up our mailbox. I tell ya, if it weren't for someone asking us for money, we would be downright lonely.
OK, so that having been established, I assume we aren't the only ones getting this junk mail and I am most likely, preaching to the choir here. The choir that is getting very tempted to leave church, I might add.
My main concern is not about the number of pieces of mail I get but with the quality of the publications that are in those over-sized manila envelopes. My husband used to be in graphic design and I have worked for a couple of magazines and so we were privy to rough costs for printing fancy dancy kinda stuff like we see in slick, commercial publications. I can tell you, it is NOT cheap. That's why those magazines charge so much for their advertising space. All those pretty, shiny photographs and state of the art graphic displays of text and art work, add up to large sums of hard, cold cash, pretty darned fast, I can tell you.
And now we are just getting out of a world wide recession and, of course, charitable organizations have been hit hard too. Understandably so. Most folks just don't have that extra few dollars over the last few years and so, have cut back on their giving.
Everyone's hurting.
So why now, at this crucial time, aren't charitable organizations cutting back on the publication costs of their letters of solicitation? I believe anyone who is familiar with fundraising knows how few of those kits mailed out actually produce decent sized cheques. Let's say, one in three or four hundred, even though I suspect it may be much less than that. If you do the math on that, you come up with figures that are just staggering and make me wonder who is at the helm, making these decisions. Perhaps, if they stuck to simple public service ads on television or radio or through the internet; not to mention even lowering the cost of the mail outs, I expect most folks would honour the cause more readily. I strongly suspect I am not the only candidate who gets disgusted at the blatant waste of money in those letters that go out to the general public.
But as long as we keep on just throwing that junk mail in the compost bin - and I sincerely hope you are at least doing that with it - these groups just won't get the message.
If they were run like companies, they'd have fired their public relations staff a long time ago. Or have gone bankrupt. But, as far as I know, charitable organization CEOs don't get fired when they don't meet their quotas for donations in any given year.
Maybe that's part of the problem.