Posted by Mike Smith :: March 18, 2008 @ 5:33 am

It began with good intentions in response to a simple request. It has become a sore subject that will definitely cause me to act differently from now on.

Towards the end of last year, I received a number of donation requests from charitable organizations. They were all trying to meet their year-end goals and were asking for any help that I could provide. Of the many requests I received, I chose three charities to donate to. All were asking for small amounts, typically less than one thousandth of the maximum person-to-person loan amount from Lending Club, so it seemed easy to give them the help that they needed.

It’s clear to me that selling my address, in addition to taking my donation, was likely the real way that at least one of these charities made its end of year goal. By giving to more than one of these organizations, I’ll never know which one sold me out. Perhaps they all did. The flow of junk mail that has followed my donations is simply amazing. As I write this post, it’s been over two months since I made my donations, yet I still receive between two and four new donation requests every day!

The requests usually come with a “gift” such as a notepad or address labels. At first, the address labels really did seem like a gift. They were useful and saved me from having to write out my address by hand or purchase labels. As they continue to arrive, these labels have become a curse. I have many more than I’ll need for the coming year. The labels have my name and address on them, so they pose an identity theft risk if I throw them out. My normal method for dealing with such items, shredding, is also problematic. The labels are stickers and tend to jam my shredder as a result. I can usually shred a few labels along with other documents without much trouble, but I’m getting so many of them that it’s becoming difficult to get rid of them all.

As I wrote in my post about charitable giving, it’s important to find charitable organizations that have low overhead and use most of their contributions towards their stated causes. A new criterion that I’m adding is that they won’t disclose your personal information to third parties. The charities I chose are all reputable, national charities, so to see this type of behavior from them is disheartening. I would also prefer not being contacted by the charity itself with repeated donation requests. All of that communication is using up the money that I donated instead of reaching those in need.