It’s About Making Babies!

Last month my Internet activity hit a snag – screeds of unwanted UCE and SPAM, most of it the program stuff – lotteries, pharmacies, enlargements, ‘legal’ software, loans. Starting in September, I figured that either some SPAM mogul just got back from jail, or college kids decided to take up an annoying part time job, sending SPAM.

I never liked ‘fundraising’. There are times a collection is useful, when a person or family encounters a natural disaster, fire, flood.

For larger causes, though, I have a problem. A friend of mine related to being caught in flooding – a Salvation Army truck pulled up and started handing out blankets. A Red Cross truck pulled up and started selling coffee and doughnuts. Since then I look carefully at the operation and reputation of anyone ‘fundraising’. It isn’t that I don’t want to help people. But many organizations are parasites, creating income for themselves while accomplishing little good.

Those stickers and phone calls for ‘sheriffs’ association’ donations. This always bothered me. For one, if I don’t contribute I feel threatened that the police won’t respond if I need them. It turns out that it is illegal, most places in the US, for police and fire departments to request donations – it is too intimidating, and lends itself to illegal corruption. What is happening, as reported by major media, is a telemarketing group makes the calls and collects the money for whichever state or jurisdiction you live in, sends 10% or less of the money to the sheriff or police department, and consider the rest ‘expenses’ – salaries, buying more lists of phone numbers, etc. That is, people are making careers of intimidating or lying to people about how much they help their community.

Where do SPAMMING and telemarket scams come from? From school systems and churches. They teach our kids to ‘fundraise’.

We send the girl scouts around selling cookies. Not because the cookies are good, which they are, but because you are supporting the Girl Scouts – which is a lot less visible in doing anything other than sell cookies than they were 40 years ago. When I was in school I sold candy for the school band. The FFA guys sold fruit. Not because the candy and fruit are good, or a good value (which the fruit was), but because the organization benefited. My 3rd grade foster son brought home a brochure of ‘items’ from coffee cups and flower vases to plaques to picture frames, for some vaguely described elementary school fund.

This is not business. This is SPAMMING. A business tries to survive by serving a community need. Selling lawn mowers, candy, ice cream, coffee cups. Selling a product or service because the product or service has value to the customer. What fund raising does, is divert tax revenue from expenditures legitimately arrived at through legal means, to fund stuff I often don’t want my tax dollars to support.

More dangerously, fundraising, in general, especially when we organize our kids to do the ‘selling’, tells them that it is fine to expect people to buy things from them, even when the customer doesn’t need the product.

The school or the church or whatever organization draws money from the community, our kids learn a skewed sense of value, and we dilute our tax base. When, really, if the organization provided a service, they should be able to raise enough revenue to operate.

I realize that a lot of good people believe they are helping their community, stopping friends, relatives, and neighbors and asking for money. And that is a good thing, we should care and nurture those in need.

It used to be that salesmen made ‘cold calls’ only to businesses, that door-to-door salesmen were limited to encyclopedia, vacuum, Fuller Brushes and Watson products. And were generally not thought of as a nice thing to happen. Now we have school kids selling stuff they don’t care about to people that don’t need the stuff.

How far is raising band money, from sending millions of emails to a list of people, for pharmacies and enlargements and lotteries that don’t exist? We may not sit our kids down and show them how to SPAM – although online school fundraising cannot be that far off – but we aren’t teaching them about value, and only selling what is worth selling.