The 46¢ Snow Day

After dithering about this morning, paralyzed with indecision about whether or not to trek into the office, I decided to stay home. At 8:15, when I made the call, it was snowing - gently but steadily. Now, shortly after lunch, it's coming down at a good clip. Clogs were fine when I put the girl on the bus; when I go pick her up at a friend's house later, I'll need boots.

I'm shuffling papers, checking email, baking bread, thinking about a website, doing laundry, contemplating benchmarking, and enjoying the quiet. It feels like a gift, this day - though I'm working, I'm not at work. Caramel brownies are on the agenda, and a fire in the fireplace wouldn't be wrong.

Besides, it was a great mail day. Today's pile included a valentine, a poem in an envelope made from a magazine picture of a pork roast, no bills, and an oversized solicitation from the goddamned NRDC containing a return envelope with a 46¢ stamp.

Remember, people, open all those envelopes from the NRDC, because they might just be sending you a free stamp.




(PS: If you need the back story on why I'm so irritated at the NRDC, read these posts.)

OMFG

I have kind of lost my blogging mojo. Oh, there are lots of posts in draft, and lots of ideas rattling around in my skull, but the actual sitting down and applying quill pen to parchment? That's just not happening.

Whatev. I'll be here when I'm here.

But lest you think I'm not still paying attention to charitable giving, guess what I got in yesterday's mail? You got it! A direct mail piece from the NRDC! Yes, the second one this year! And we're only halfway through January!

Why yes, I do like poking things with sticks.

One Out Of Four

You know how in The Polar Express Santa picks a kid off the train to receive the first gift of Christmas?

Today, I got the first solicitation of 2013! And guess who it was from? Give me an N, give me an R...that's right - my number one bad charity of 2012, the Natural Resources Defense Council. Alas, there was no live stamp on the return envelope - though I guess that's progress of a sort.

* * * * * * * *

After my Cranky Philanthropist post last week, I made sure to "amplify" it by posting it on Twitter, four separate times, calling out each of the bad charities and using their Twitter handles so that they'd see the tweets. Did anyone respond? One charity did - Riverkeeper.

Riverkeeper's Director of Development followed up with an email, and after a back and forth, we made up. She sent me a copy of last year's thank you note - which I assume had been lost by the post office - and I told her they could keep us on the list if they promised only one solicitation a year (and no newsletters).

So, Riverkeeper's back on the good charity list.

* * * * * * * *

Believe me, I'm not saving all of the charitable mail this year. But I am still paying attention.

The Cranky Philanthropist

A year ago, after sending out a raft of little charitable contributions at the end of 2011, each with its own little admonition, please do not solicit more than once a year, please do not sell or rent my name, I decided to conduct a small experiment. For the whole of 2012, I kept every piece of mail that came in asking for money - snail mail, not email. By the middle of December, it amounted to a goodly boxful. I sorted it, tallied it, and - I'm sorry to report - was forced to add a few charities to the naughty list.

Most organizations are either sophisticated enough to flag their database in such a way that they did not, in fact, send out multiple solicitations. Others are so unsophisticated that I never get, nor expect to get, more than one or two a year - the local volunteer fire department comes to mind.

After the great sorting, we sat down to discuss the various solicitations, en famille. Some were rejected:

• Boys & Girls Club: "I don't swim there anymore."
• Care: Seven solicitations in one calendar year is too many, especially since we've never given to you.
• The local Police Benevolent Association: "They can always ask the Girl Scouts to fundraise for them." (Um, huh? Don't ask me, I'm just reporting what the nine year old said.)

Some were newly added to the list:

• American Museum of Fly Fishing: "We have to do that because of Daddy", who does like fly fishing but doesn't get to do it much at all.
• Fair Girls: They work to prevent the exploitation of girls worldwide and Nick Kristof told me about them.
• EarthJustice: mostly because I liked their tag line about the earth needing a good lawyer (and Charity Navigator gave them 4 stars).
• Dr. Hawa Abdi (via Vital Voices): Dr. Abdi runs a hospital, school and refugee camp in Somalia, and and Nick Kristof told me about her too.

In the end, we sent contributions to a mixed bag of local organizations (the afore-mentioned fire department, the local historical society, the day care center the girl attended) and bigger ones (Planned Parenthood, Unicef, International Rescue Committee), domestic and international.

And, because I am a crank, I sent notes - without contributions - to four organizations that we've supported in the past, because they really irritated me.

• The NRDC sent us ten pieces of mail in 11 and a half months. Six of them included a return envelope with a live stamp - 45 cents right there in each solicitation! I used one of those envelopes to ask them to take me off their list, and had no compunctions about readdressing the remaining five to use to give to small charities who didn't waste their money giving me a stamp.
• Doctors without Borders sent us six pieces of mail, and they get extra demerits because not one of their envelopes included a return address, which is a sneaky way of getting someone to open your envelope in the first place.
• Partners In Health sent us five pieces of mail, three too many. (Even though I asked for only one solicitation a year, two doesn't offend my sensibilities hugely because, well, I'm not that rigid, and anyway, the lists do get prepped in advance.)
• Riverkeeper sent us four pieces of mail - too much mail, compounded by the fatal error of not having thanked us for last year's gift.

When I ask that a charity only solicit us once a year, I mean it. I don't want paper and stamps and time wasted on asking me for money; I want the money spent on the cause that I'm supporting. It's simple, really. It's all about stewardship.

You can, though, be sure that I'll keep opening the envelopes from the NRDC. I mean, you can always use a nice first class stamp to pay some bill or another, right?