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.