Posted on 01/25/2026 8:48:53 AM PST by DFG
n 2025, my wife and I received 478 direct mail appeals from charitable organizations and other non-profits. That’s right — 478. That is an average of slightly over nine a week.
How do I know the exact number? In 2024, I noticed that the number of letters from charities was increasing. There was always one or two in the mail, sometimes more. The only way to see what was really happening was to collect these mailings for a year and count them. So, after Christmas in 2024, I found an empty box I thought might hold a few hundred letters, but was small enough not to be in the way. Then, every time we got a letter from a non-profit organization, it would go into the box.
After New Year’s Day, 2026, I started counting and sorting the letters and packages in the box. There were so many that I had to sort by subject, such as animals, diseases, food assistance, etc., then sort again by organization. Surprisingly, 84 different organizations had sent us at least one donation request. The weight of all this mail, minus the box, was right at 32 pounds, and the volume was about 1.15 cubic feet.
Most of the letters came in plain white envelopes with the non-profit’s name or logo on the outside. Others had images on the outside designed to get our attention, like pictures of starving dogs, elderly people in dire straits, or disfigured children. Some had literal calls for assistance written on the outside.
The guilt didn’t end there. Some letters included guarantees that a donation would be matched or multiplied. Some claimed that our gift will get doubled, tripled, or quadrupled. One even claimed that our gift would be multiplied fourteen times.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
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Jim
I don’t give to any of them. I used to get lectures at work yearly about the united way crap. NOPE!
The author has probably donated to various charities. And these charities put his info into a database for other charities.
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
It doesn’t pay to contribute to charitable organizations that solicit donations by mail. They simply waste your donation on further unsolicited donations requests. Sad.
Many are stricken with the cancer of FRAUD
Your $20 bucks means nothing, and the real goal is establishing their bona fides to access government money. That’s where the riches lie.
Trash can. All of them. Don’t feed those cats.
After the hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans I sent a donation to a church organization to help. Within two weeks I had dozens of requests from other groups of that same church asking for donations.
Obviously they will sell your address to other groups who then will flood your mailbox.
The worst thing is they pay 1/3 to 1/2 First Class Mail rates. That’s probably below cost for the Post Office.
So all of us suckers who buy First Class stamps are subsidizing them!
I’m with you, I don’t give to any of them anymore. One of their means of income is selling lists of their donors to others, so I say to hell with them
478, for a year?
I get spammed from the GOP, Trump, and Trump’s son that much in a month.
Texts and email, together.
It's even worse with nonprofits that solicit over the phone. 80% of the donations go to pay the telephone solicitors. Good luck trying to remove yourself from those lists.
That’s what happened to us. Last year we donated to a charity in memory of a friend who had died. Almost immediately we started receiving all sorts of mail and popups on the Internet asking us to contribute to various things.
I believe what happens if you donate to one or two charities that you like you get on a master list that gets bought by every fundraising organization out there and that’s where you start getting solicitations.
My late wife had a few organizations she liked to give money to and the next thing you know we are deluded. One thing she would do is that if the solicitation had return postage in the envelope she would just cut the stamps and put them in a pile to use for herself. We just re-
But once you start your own, every sucker list in the country.
Make a political contributions and see how many more requests you’ll get.
My favorite is this: we want your input, please fill out our survey, donate $XXX and we’ll process your inputs.
Why I stopped long ago, donating to charity appeals. I now give money directly to individuals who need it.
My wife and I direct all our charitable contributions locally. That way we know exactly where the money is going and how it is being used. The largest portion goes to our church, and then we spread the rest across about a half dozen others. We know for a fact that most of these are run by volunteers, or a very small number of paid staff in the case of a local shelter.
I’m very suspect of unsolicited letters from charities we don’t know.
You can investigate charities and pick and choose but yeah you’re gonna get inundated.
My wife and I direct all our charitable contributions locally.
The same here. Retired now, but I never let them guilt/force me into giving. God loves a CHEERFUL giver, not one trying to please his/her boss.
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