Here’s a question for readers of Flathead Memo. Has any one of you, in the last year, ever received an email from an activist organization that simply sought to inform you — and that did not ask you to send the organization money?
Nonprofits that do good work on issues that are important to me send me many emails — but every last electron of them is just padding around a pitch for money. Sometimes the “Send us money!” sentence is preceded or followed by a survey, an attempt to fool me into believing the sender is interested in my opinion.
I get as much as this genre of email as I do of announcements of deals on hot pharmaceuticals and hot Russian blonds. At least the emails on drugs and dames are straightforward and to the point.
My guess is that most of these fundraising pitches are written by twenty-something campaign creatures who never had to consider whether a fundraising letter was good enough to have a reasonable chance of inciting enough contributions to more than pay for the postage and printing. Nowadays, these “development specialists,” fueled on double-sugared expressos and a righteousness never leavened by a second thought, spend a hour each Tuesday and Thursday morning writing something they think will rile us into reaching for our credit card, hit the send key, and wait for the money to roll in.
In my case, hell will freeze, thaw, and refreeze, and I’ll never reach for my credit card. I’ve developed an immunity to emails that beg, no matter how noble the cause on behalf of which the begging occurs. Let these fundraisers lick stamps for a change. Let them lick stamps for change.