You know the saying, “No good deed goes unpunished”? Making a donation to a charity can feel like you’ve doomed yourself to solicitation hell. Everyone who’s ever given money to a cause has probably gotten those address label “gifts” in the mail a few months later (for all the letters you don’t write and the bills you auto-pay). Or learned to screen the persistent phone calls from charity telemarketers. Or sighed every time they tossed a letter urging an increase in their monthly donation into the recycling bin unopened.
Charitable organizations may seem overly aggressive when it comes to marketing, but without sustained contributions from donors like you, most of them wouldn’t survive, so we should probably cut them a little more slack than we might with other groups calling us to repeatedly ask for money (cough alumni associations cough). That said, you don’t have to just put up with the endless emails and mountains of letters if they really bother you. Here are the steps you can take to minimize the solicitations.
Choose the right charities
Not all charities are created equal when it comes to post-donation solicitation. Before you hand over your credit card information or send that check, look up the organization’s privacy policy. Or, better yet, use Charity Navigator, which evaluates charities’ privacy policies. For any charity, you can quickly see which ones clearly state they do not: a) sell or share your personal information, or b) send donor mailings on behalf of other organizations. Likewise, the Charity Navigator legend tells you if a charity doesn’t have this clear privacy policy or requires you to opt-out of mailing lists and information sharing.
If the organization requires you to opt-out, be sure to check for a box or button that allows you to do so when you make your donation.
Remove yourself from phone and mailing lists
Common advice for getting rid of junk mail and telemarketers might also work when you’re dealing with an overload of charity mail and phone calls. With charities, though, you might need to take additional steps.
Charity Navigator, for example, advises that when you tell the Direct Marketing Association you don’t want to receive unsolicited mail, you should specify that includes mail from both commercial and charitable organizations. Otherwise, the DMA will just put you on its for-profit list only.
To ask a charity to stop sending you mail directly, consider writing “Take me off your mailing list” on the reply card and sending it back the charity. BBB Consumer Education advises:
If you write to a charity to request that it not mail to you, be sure to send the return card that came with the appeal, so that the charity can readily identify you. If you write to eliminate duplicate appeals (those with slight variations in your name or address), send all the labels, with their variations. A charity’s appeal envelope on which you’ve written delete my name—or return to sender—and put in the mailbox will not reach the charity unless you add postage, since the nonprofit mailing rates that charities use won’t pay for returns.
Also, as we’ve noted before:
You should register on the
national do not call list
if you haven’t already. It’s illegal for a company to keep calling you if you’re on this list and you have verbally asked them not to call you at least once. Unfortunately, it is not illegal for non-profits. But most non-profits run seasonal campaigns, so at least your lead will be put to rest for three to 11 months.
Even when dealing with a non-profit, you should ask for a manager and tell them you’ve repeatedly requested to be placed on the do not call list. Keep in mind that a prior caller may not have done their job and removed you, and this new, innocent caller is getting all the blame. The manager needs to to deal with these kind of customer issues so the callers can keep dialing.
If a non-profit calls asking you to donate and you feel tempted to do so, it will also be better to make your donation directly: The telemarketers making the calls are probably a percentage of your donation—and it could be a rather large one. Your money will go farther towards the cause if you politely decline over the phone and then donate directly to the charity.
Split your donations between fewer charities
Instead of giving small amounts to several charities, donate more to select organizations. This not only helps more of your donation go towards the cause (rather than being eaten up by transaction costs), it could also keep your information from being sold or shared as often.
Donations of $25 or less, Charity Navigator says, barely cover the charity’s marketing costs, so many organizations sell those donors’ names to other charities to generate extra revenue. It might seem unfair, but charities are more likely to protect the privacy of more generous donors.
Donate anonymously
Perhaps the easiest way to do the good deed of donating without getting punished with spam is to donate anonymously.
Google’s OneToday donation app used to be a good bet for this—it allowed you donate to various non-profit projects, just one dollar at a time, and your personal information was never shared with the charities directly. Unfortunately, it was shut down earlier this year with basically no notice.
OneToday worked via Network for Good, which also allows you to donate to charities anonymously via its website, and will only provide your contact information to the charities you support with your permission. You can still make donations that way, even without the ease of the Google app.
Otherwise, there are lots of donation apps out there, but it can be tough to determine what exactly they do with your data, so use caution and read those privacy policies carefully. Many of those we checked out while researching this article were either geared toward religious organizations (Givelify) or unclear about how your data will be shared with the non-profits you donate to (CoinUp).
There might not be a 100% foolproof way to never get another charity solicitation, but the tips above should help slow the deluge.
This article was originally published in May 2014 by Melanie Pinola. It was substantially revised in August 2020 by Joel Cunningham to include more current information, update dead links and revise the section on giving anonymously.