In 2003, a friend ran her first 5k and raised money for a great cause, Guide Dogs for the Blind and I gave $20 happily. To this day, Guide Dogs mails me postcards every few months, no matter how many times my address changes. Today I got this text from the nonprofit 21 years after my sole donation.
My point is Customer Relations Management (CRM) software like Salesforce is too good at what it does and must be stopped.
@mathowie It's a real problem. I run a non-profit which makes a few charitable donations per year in decent amounts and I always donate when someone has lost a loved one or is running a race. The amount of much-later emails and paper mail and occasional PHONE CALLS (what!) is astonishing.
Especially hard b/c these are all good causes and things I generally support but I have to say "Please take me off of your pet rescue/trans kids support/medical debt relief CRM list" more than I'd care to.
@mathowie We finally started mailing paper checks, with no address on them, with a contact name of Miss Woo (my sister's cat) so at least we know which outreach attempts are coming from a letter that specifically stated "This is a one time thing do not add me to your mailing lists"
@jessamyn@mathowie Various orgs urge monthly donations instead of one-time or annual, so I send $5/mo to several of them. One mails me a hand-addressed, personalized thank-you note monthly.
I’ve talked to several nonprofits as well as catalog-mailing retailers about this, and it’s easier to stop catalogs than it is to stop charities. NPOs believe snail mail creates sustaining donations and that they can’t afford to stop farming their donors. Then they trade mailing lists.
@jessamyn@skry@mathowie the slightly interesting addition to that is that when I was writing the stickers, generic ones didn't work so we tried to get more specific, which is why this one now exists:
@danhon@skry@mathowie Yeah that totally makes sense but there's definitely a "Do not tell me about $FLAVOR_OF_THE_YEAR" aspect that I could use, whether it's blockchain, ai or nfts.
But realistically I am writing MYSELF a card that says "Do not tell me that my implementation of a thing which you also could have done but did not implement is not working for you" 😂
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