Tuesday, November 06, 2007
Charity: Giving to some may be a bad idea...
Charities that put scales of requests of $500, $1000, $2000 especially after a one time donation, marked as such are using a different idiom of giving/sharing...
If charity is amongst a community of neighbors, there's an asking only when one knows the person is in a position to give. Many corporations broadcast requests to their employees to contribute to charities such as United Way which puts a strain on the relationship of giver and accepting if one doesn't consider this is a different dialect of impersonal optional request.
Sponsoring a specific whale or child or shoebox of school supplies project works effectively as a selling-charity model because people want to see tangible, one-individual results. If your money ends up being lost in a huge organization on pages of printing that were mistyped so all junked, your piece of the pie, big for you, small for multinational charity, is devalued, nulled.
Awhile back, Esther Schindler encouraged me to make a donation to her favorite charity: Heifer International which I quickly abandoned because of the above tactic. Likewise charities that abuse personal contact by printing address labels in an attempt to feel obliged to reciprocate is outright manipulative. This act engages a psychological habit but creates cognitive dissonance.
For those that want to contribute to worthy charities, please check out the ones listed here...
| | View blog reactionsIf charity is amongst a community of neighbors, there's an asking only when one knows the person is in a position to give. Many corporations broadcast requests to their employees to contribute to charities such as United Way which puts a strain on the relationship of giver and accepting if one doesn't consider this is a different dialect of impersonal optional request.
Sponsoring a specific whale or child or shoebox of school supplies project works effectively as a selling-charity model because people want to see tangible, one-individual results. If your money ends up being lost in a huge organization on pages of printing that were mistyped so all junked, your piece of the pie, big for you, small for multinational charity, is devalued, nulled.
Awhile back, Esther Schindler encouraged me to make a donation to her favorite charity: Heifer International which I quickly abandoned because of the above tactic. Likewise charities that abuse personal contact by printing address labels in an attempt to feel obliged to reciprocate is outright manipulative. This act engages a psychological habit but creates cognitive dissonance.
For those that want to contribute to worthy charities, please check out the ones listed here...
