Open letter to political groups...

[seawasp]

The more letters you send out begging for money, the less I'm inclined to give you. If it was a really time-limited thing -- as in, the whole shebang would be over and done with in one month -- okay, you've only got so much time. But the political circus is NEVER over. Once a week, okay. Once a month, better. Once a day? Twice a day? New deadlines every week that OMG MUST MEET OR THE RACE IS LOST? No. I lose interest completely. One letter a year, that would be ideal. Remind me of the cause, let me know what the situation is, and let me decide if and when I want to donate.

But the more stridently you tell me how DOOOMED things are EVERY SINGLE DAY? Sorry, the less I believe you, and the less I care. It becomes very much like telemarketers, and they shut me off automatically when they call; it now no longer matters to me if a telemarketer's for a political party I hate, or for the Police Benevolent Association, if the phone call's clearly robo-dialed, I hang up. It's over.

You want to convince me to care? Act as though you care about my time and attention and not like you must scream about DOOOOM every ten seconds. 

Comments

[elainegrey.livejournal.com]

I don't understand why they don't understand how quickly we learn to ignore noise. Surely they are using metrics though, so ... won't they eventually see a saturation point? A loss of responsiveness?

And yet, people still respond to email scams.

[sinanju.livejournal.com]

Sure, they know there's a saturation point. But they don't care because it's all a numbers game. If you ask enough people to give you money, some tiny fraction of them will say yes. Ask a large enough number of people often enough and the amount of money you can obtain makes it worth the effort--and the less it costs you, the truer that becomes.. And that's doubly true if they don't give a tinker's damn about how many people they aggravate with robo-calls in the process of finding the tiny proportion of suckers who will hand over some cash.

[theoldone.livejournal.com]

I am so on-board with you in this!

[kengr]

data point:

I got one from (I think) the DNC about 10-15 years back. I told them I didn't want to be on their list. I got another one some months later and was far less polite. I also contacted the ISP their email address was associated with.

At the time a friend was working customer support for a different (national) ISP. She informed me that they'd been kicked off the ISP she worked for *and two others that she knew of* for violating ISP rules about spamming.

Like spammers, they don't really *care* if they alienate *you*. There are enough marks that'll cough up dough that it's worth their while to keep doing it.

[terry austin (from livejournal.com)]

In the end, they do it because it works. There are always enough hard core supporters who will respond every time, and it costs them more to sort out who is who than to just spam everyone.

As a side note, no charity associated with the police or fire department will ever call you soliciting donations. Ever. They make a point of not doing so because of all the scams in their names. If you get a call from someone claiming to be collecting for a police or fire related charity, report them to the real police.

[gridlore.livejournal.com]

I've been unsubscribing left and right from political groups recently. I'm disabled. On a fixed income, and like you said, I don't being told six times a day that my $5 is going to save the country.

[hvideo.livejournal.com]

I'm doing my best to permanently eliminate these companies. I mean, they keep sending begging letters to my mother, saying that her donation is ABSOLUTELY VITAL to them and their cause. Since my mother died 2 years ago, it's pretty clear that with her ABSOLUTELY VITAL support no longer available these companies are going to dry up and blow away any second now....

Sigh. As if. I am perfectly willing to help them save money. If they include an envelope that doesn't cost me a stamp, I'll let them know that the odds of my mom sending a donation are absolutely zero and will never change. But even in those cases, it has taken years to get off the list (after telling them she's dead for the 12th time or so).

I suspect that many of these solicitations are outsourced. The company actually sending out the begging letters probably has no financial incentive to remove dead people from the lists. They probably get paid per letter they send out for their client. If a name is deleted, they make less money. The CLIENT would have an incentive to save on costs, but even if the return envelopes go to the client company (instead of the outsource company) they go to a dedicated Subscription Department - which probably TOTALLY RESENTS ANYTHING that is not "Here's some money, sign me up".