Interesting thoughts on telemarketers

A recent entry on the blog Popehat (hat-tip to Miss D. for introducing me to this blog) contains some very interesting facts about, and suggestions on how to deal with, telemarketing charity appeals. Here’s a couple of extracts:

Let’s make this very clear: unless you are very lucky in which charities are calling you, and unless you very carefully research them before giving, any donations you make over the phone are doing very little to help any worthwhile charity. Instead, any donation you give is primarily used to promote and continue the industry that calls you during dinner and harasses you, the industry that painstakingly trains its call center employees not to take “no” for an answer. You are the lifeblood of one of the most, if not the most, universally despised industries in America. You are paying the guy to show up at your door and call you a douchebag.

Nationwide, the telemarketing industry consumes a ludicrous amount of each dollar it collects ostensibly on behalf of charities. Take California, for example:

• More than a third of California charity telemarketing campaigns sent less than 20 cents on the dollar to the charities during 2007, the most recent year on record. Those campaigns and a smaller number of charity auctions and concerts raised $93 million for commercial fundraisers, and just $3 million for the charities.
• In 76 of those campaigns, California charities got no money at all.

Why does this frankly fraudulent practice continue? Well, for a few reasons. One, serious enforcement action against bogus charities and their money-sucking telemarketers is so rare that it’s very notable when it happens. More often, government agencies simply force bogus charities and crooked telemarketers to shut down — which simply allows them, in classic telemarketer style, to re-open under a new name.

. . .

… second of all, it’s the fault of the charities. Charities that are willing to take twenty-five cents of each dollar you donate, and let the other seventy-five cents fall into the coffers of telemarketers, hold you and your money in contempt. Their willingness to grasp a little money in a deceitful way at the expense of perpetuating an overwhelmingly fraudulent industry is at the core of the problem here. If you treated this tactic with the revulsion it deserves, and inflicted the social consequences upon them that it deserves, it would stop.

Third, it’s your fault. And by “you” I mean those of our readers who give money in response to telemarketing solicitations. You are like the one moron out of 10,000 email recipients who buys the herbal penis-enlarging product — you make a crooked, intrusive industry possible and profitable.

Are there exceptions? Sure. [But … ] If you can’t confirm, through reasonable diligence, that the people calling fall within one of those rare exceptions, then do yourself — and society — a favor. Tell them “I don’t donate to charities that telemarket.” Be prepared to sever your relationship with the charity as a consequence for their telemarketing. Send them an email telling them that you used to donate, but now that they are telemarketing, you no longer will.

If enough people do it, charities will rethink their contemptible alliance with the telemarketing industry, and may be moved to detach that fat, slick parasite from their sides.

There’s much more at the link. Recommended reading, as is the entire blog. I’ve added them to my daily reading list. (And no, they have no connection to the Pope or Catholicism whatsoever!)

Peter