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Comment by Scooty | Hacker News Reader

The other day I was stopped on the sidewalk by someone who told me they worked for a large environmental non profit that helps save endangered species. He asked if I would subscribe to help. I offered to make a donation and was told they I can't do a one time donation and they "really need subscribers". He even told me I could just cancel after the first payment.

Taking advantage of someone being forgetful is sleazy.

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In the UK a typical suggested donation might be £10 per month and the first three payments will go to the sales person's employer - which is typically a third party, not the charity. If you cancel after the first month they get paid but the charity gets nothing. It's sleazier than you think!

I'm a member of a club in the UK which raises money for charity - we've stopped giving money to corporate charities because their overheads are such a high percentage of their takings - at this point they're largely just self-perpetuating bureaucracy machines.

We give cash to small volunteer-run charities where we know that 100% of the money raised goes to the cause in question.

What do you consider a high percentage?

Looking at Oxfam, it's 10% admin and 7% fundraising [1], which doesn't seem too bad given their global reach.

Admittedly their reputation has taken a bit of a tumble due to the scandals.

[1] https://www.oxfam.org.uk/donate/how-we-spend-your-money

I think there's a fairly open question about how those percentages are calculated. Oxfam is an outlier, with a very low stated percentage being used for overheads, but it'd be interesting to see a breakdown of how the remaining cash was used. For example - are staff costs in a target country (say, Haiti) considered admin, or is the UK base only counted?

Personally I would like a general rule of no more than 10% split between admin and fundraising, with 5% being considered the normal. 10% makes a nice Schilling fence.

Ideally I won't allow any budget for advertising, because that will just move money from one charity to another.

Alternatively I would only donate to the top of Give Well.

For most of those charity orgs, you're being more generous to the middle men than to those in need

I like the charity-starts-at-home approach. I don't know how people do this in first world countries, but in developing countries is relatively easy to find a cause.

That's insane. A better approach to donating to charities could be: https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities

If you want to give to a charity because you heard about it on the street, at least try to give the money directly and cut the middle man.

It's not just taking advantage of forgetfulness, I think there are a number of additional psychological factors that make you more likely to keep it active. Off the top of my head, I'd say: laziness might make you convince yourself that it's not a big amount, there might be a sunken cost fallacy at play (similar to how phone agents keep you on the line on purpose, which also serves to make you feel like you didn't waste the last 10 minutes listening to their offer), or you might start feeling guilty at denying the good cause money all of a sudden, etc.

>It's not just taking advantage of forgetfulness, I think there are a number of additional psychological factors that make you more likely to keep it active.

yeah, these companies really like to take advantage of my adhd too.

And the unsubscribe process might be a chore: at least that's what happens with email subscriptions.

I haven't in general had issues with email unsubscribing, worst case I will have to log in.

I have had to write an angry email to a paper because they though they could get away with only doing phone unsubcribing (when they did signups just fine online).

Exactly same thing happened to me in India for some UN Child related initiative (they claimed). Ultimately they wanted a credit card for subscribing and I didn't have they. I was wondering why the fuss about Credit card but now I got it that it's for forgetful auto renewals.

`Meetup.com` did that to me once too. Seems companies are fine with this just to renew subscription because who bothers to get it cancelled.

how did the meetup.com experience look like?

unlike all the other examples, you normally never want to pay for meetup.com if it is not a longterm subscription. it makes no sense otherwise, unless you have some weird corner case of needing to manage a large group for a short time, but then dissolve it afterwards.

Because My meetup page moved to a Pro network. I contacted Meetup support and told them this and then they issued a credit note. It was hassle-less but the auto-renewal thing frightened me.

so they upgraded your account without warning? that would not be nice indeed.

Every charity I've been stopped by in the past decade has done this. Donate $20 cash right now? Nope, we can't do that... but we can sign you up for monthly ongoing payments of $200, or even just $25 if that's all you can spare.

Even when I make a one-time donation online to some charities, a lot of them seem to spend that donation sending me mailers asking me to donate again. I wish I could donate with a "don't add me to your list" option.

You can do that with a money order. Of course you can't do that online.

I chatted once with a friend in the non profit space about a service that let people donate online anonymously to charities. She didn't think the idea was a good one because, just like for businesses, there's a lot of value in knowing who your donors (customers in the business scenario) are for non profits. They get additional income from selling lists, they want to reach out and build a relationship (especially recurring donations).

It makes sense to me from an organizational standpoint, but I too wish there was an easy way to do one off donations.

As a counterpoint, I read somewhere that Bill Gates advice about donating was to focus on one to three charities and really get involved and knowledgeable about the space, rather than drop $20 on 10 random charities. It helps both the charities you pick (focus, more money, longer term commitment) and the ones you don't (they don't spend money trying to get you to donate further when you aren't really committed).

> there's a lot of value in knowing who your donors (customers in the business scenario) are for non profits

Well, of course, but the things they use that knowledge for are bad for me.

> They get additional income from selling lists

OK, then they're already my enemy.

> they want to reach out and build a relationship (especially recurring donations)

Ah, there's a word for people who try to build a relationship with you in order to repeatedly get money off you: "Scammers."

This exact thing happened to me with Greenpeace. Didn’t realize I had a subscription until later, then the awkward call to cancel and associated guilt trip.

yeah this happened to me with Amnesty International a few years ago. I felt very pressured and signed up just to cancel when i got home. Since then I never even stop to talk to them.

I reckon he gets a lot more $$ commission if you sign up. Maybe he even lied about not being able to make a single donation.

Amnesty International got a couple hundred bucks from me this way over the past 6 years. At less than 5 dollars per month, I just couldn't get myself motivated to figure out how to cancel their weird pull-based recurring payment model[0]. The combination of a process with unclear way of cancelling, them not doing a bad job at being a charity, and me having no patience to deal with their "subscriber retentions" people means they still get the money, and I keep wondering whether shooting them with a GDPR "please delete all my data" request would be a simpler way to cancel.

[0] - I'm bitter about this wrt. banks in Poland. I should be able to view all recurring payments that pull money from my account in a single place in a web interface, and cancel them from there. Alas, the banks are happy to send out my money, but offer no way for me to see a list of recurring payments.

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