We had a drive for “United Way”... well know for Ceo’s stealing out of the pot...Our company HR Dept. put a whole lot of ‘pressure’ on employees to donate.... Even when you say you don’t donate to the organization they continue to press you because they have ‘participation goals’ to reach.
Yep - been there, experienced that.
Good old United Way.
I stopped donating to them the year our local UW kicked the local boy scouts out for the national org’s previous anti-homo policy for scout leaders. A few times after that the pressure came about the “participation” goals blah blah blah. Here has been my stock answer: “Thank you very much for offering me the opportunity in the workplace to donate to the UW. I evaluate my charitable giving at the beginning of every tax year, and UW was not on my list this year. But thank you.” Maybe once, someone tried to pry out of me the reason why UW did not make it. I refused to play. I just repeated my stock answer. Eventually I would just get follow up emails, even begging me to put $0 in, just so they could meet their participation goals. I deleted them.
As a side note, I have a variation of this for fellow workers who try to sell me stuff or donate to other causes, even girl scout cookies for someone’s kids, as I do not like to be a captive donor where someone takes advantage of our relationship to extract a donation. My stock answer is: “Thank you very much for offering me the opportunity to donate to your charity [....]. Company policy is that UW is the only charity that employees will be asked to donate this year. If your charity is supported by UW, I will respond through that campaign. Else, I will follow company policy. Thanks for asking though.”
The HR department at one big engineering firm terminated any employee who did not participate in the United Way scheme, even during the bad publicity of Aramony having his hand in the cookie jar.