tim's experiment

I am not an uncharitable person. I contribute. But there are ways of asking which are nice, and there are ways which are not nice. Most of us do not wish to be manipulated. So I am heartily annoyed by the latest habit of the people who do their solicitation through unsolicited mail: they send you a gift. The gift is not valuable. The first time it was a keyring. Very useful if you happen to need a keyring but most of us have lots of the things hanging around the place. The latest offering was a piece of plastic whose purpose escaped me.
Clearly there is some psychological justification for this approach. It makes the recipient reluctant to throw the envelope away unopened, which is what tends to happen to mail of this kind. A gift! Let’s have a look. Having opened it you then face a moral dilemma. You have in effect accepted the gift. The gift may be worthless, or at least costless to the supplier, but it now feels wrong to throw it away, and wrong to keep it without sending them something. In practice of course the “gift” probably costs less than the price of the stamp. It’s only real value is its role in persuading some recipients to send money.

With me it failed, partly because of the blatant dishonesty which came with it. On the outside of the package was a picture of a small girl, who judging by name and complexion was in Africa. You could only see her face but she looked neither well nor well-fed. And we were exhorted not to “let her starve”. But actually your money is not going to save this girl and your decision whether to send it or not won’t determine whether she lives or dies. The picture was of course taken mnoths, if not years, ago and by now the kid has been rescued, or not. I suppose the advertising agency advising this enterprise thought this was a jsutifiable way to put a human face on a dangerously statistical problem. It is easier to get people to be moved by one named individual than by the thought of millions of starving third worlders waiting to be rescued by their benevolence. And I suppose if anyone complains the answer will be that this is a matter of life and death for the distant clients of this charity so the end justifies the means.

But surely we have a right to expect people to be a bit more forthcoming than that. Faced with a strange charity people are entitled to ask what it does, who runs it, how much money it is already handling and how much of that money is spent on sending junk mail to people with no previous acquaintance with the organisation. If essential information like this is not supplied we are being offered a rather mysterious opportunity to feel good on the cheap by sending money to someone of whom we know nothing. I suppose this sort of thing cannot be banned but it can be binned.