I like to give to charities, but I've built up a couple of rules:
- I won't give you a credit card number, because I've seen too many dark patterns about canceling recurring donations. It stinks for online giving because Paypal is awful, but it's basically the only way I can guarantee that I won't need to make phone calls if my giving habits change.
- You always get a unique email address that I can cancel or sort, no matter who you are. Fastmail thankfully makes this very easy.
- Unless I really trust you not to mail me, I won't give you my real address.
Patreon, for all of its problems, has the right idea here. Donors control their subscriptions, and their addresses/emails aren't shared by default. I'd love a similar service for more conventional giving.
Is that possible with Fastmail without having your own domain? I've been looking for a mail provider where you can create unlimited mail addresses to prevent me from being tracked across services for some time now. The problem with using your own domain ([email protected] [email protected] etc) is that only laziness of not implementing automatic domain matching is keeping my identities separate.
If anybody knows of a mail provider who provides that (even with random mailbox names like [email protected]) I would be grateful if you could let me know.
They're not literally unlimited, but the limit is high enough that in practice, you can have a separate email address for every service that you use.
I do have my own domain, but I don't typically use it for most 3rd-party services. The reason I like aliases more is because if I use the gmail trick or my own domain, there's still a unique piece of information that's tied to my name. In other words, it's still identifying.
Most spammers know to strip the pluses from gmail accounts, so you're not really doing anything at all by adding those. And even if a spammer can't guess your other email addresses, they still know who you are. I'm not particularly secretive about my identity online -- I use my real name as my handle. So it's not even always about blocking spam -- sometimes you want to use an email without giving a company a very obvious link to who you are.
e.g. [email protected], [email protected], etc.
I did this for years before switching to a custom domain and it worked very well for me.
I think of throwaway addresses the same way as I think of a VPN. I shouldn't be the only person on the domain I'm using, and there shouldn't be any persistent information in the address.
With Fastmail, the only information I have to give up is that it is a Fastmail account. I can have `<some_random_string>@fastmail.com`, which makes it much harder for an advertiser or spammer to link my identity from that email to another one.
Much later I listened to a podcast or ted talk of someone who talked about charity. I believe she worked with nonprofits as her day job.
I was listening to her expecting to understand altruism, to find out how and why people donate money, and how they find worthy causes along with decent organizations to donate to.
The one thing that stuck with me was when she asserted that the number one reason people will donate to your charity is: Have they donated before.
This gave me an unexpected glimpse behind the curtain at what motivates organizations to over-contact their previous benefactors.
It made me a little sad too, reminding me a little of the petting zoo. You take a young kid to the petting zoo to interact with the animals. But then they see this tiny child has a handful of food, and you are surrounded by crazy goats that chase the helpless youngster until she throws the food and runs away.
Nearly every time I've donated to something political, it's come to bite me in the ass. Donate to a candidate? They sell/give my info to related PACs and groups (and there's no stopping it, because it's considered political speech to solicit for donations). Last time I gave money to one of the fundraisers with vests that hang around downtown, my credit card got charged at an eastern European online retailer.
I feel the only real way to avoid this is to donate through an anonymous vehicle, but I believe anonymous political donation vehicles and everything that came with the Citizens United decision to be at the core of the rot in our system.
The problem is that Candidate X owes her success to donated money. She is now beholden to her donors, not her constituents. Democracy, for sale by the dollar isn't democracy, it's a slide into oligarchy.
The only solution to this problem is public-only funding of campaigns.
I fail to see how that addresses any of the issues we have "earned media" from the cable "news" propaganda (I'm not using that word lightly here) networks or the "Citizen's United" style documentary production which would not likely be curtailed by the change you propose. All you do is shift the money from being thrown at the 16 minutes per hour of advertisement blocks to the 44 minutes per hour where we don't notice we are being advertised to.
I've gotten emails, sure, but they respect unsubscribe. From that experience, I'm comfortable donating again through ActBlue [3], the donation platform they used.
[1] https://techsolidarity.org/resources/great_slate.html
[2] related: https://idlewords.com/2019/05/what_i_learned_trying_to_secur...
Even once a week sounds like a lot but averaging more than one per day is just ridiculous.
I was just trying to be a patriotic millennial but it got me off the sms list so silver lining I guess. Now I donate whenever I have the spare cash and I don’t have to worry about them blowing up my phone.
I think this pattern really caught fire when Obama heavily employed it in 2008. That campaign bombarded your inbox for donations.
I'm under no allusions that she has the same name recognition that he has.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/07/16/us/politics/d...
That problem could be solved far more easily if all Americans were more responsible with researching what it takes to safely raise a pet and what responsibilities you have if you think you can't.
Similarly, if American voters were far more responsible with how often they voted, researching their {candidates/parties/platforms/issues}, and what they let their representatives do in their name, lots of these political issues would cease to exist (without a giant increase in spending or refactor in how campaigns can spend).
I'm registered independent, but donated to my first political candidate (ever) recently, and experienced this same hounding, to the point that I ended up blocking/banning/giving fake info just to keep them off my notification screen every day. I figure these people dont even bother filtering like the work I did above, as I had never once received solicitation for donation before. Now I'm bracing for the inevitable deluge of similar hounding from other candidates in coming years.
I dont give my real address, i use email labels for filtering and have leaf accounts in a forwarding network of emails specifically for crap like this.
I can only wonder how its going to work if the current political campaign "best practices" alienate a large slice of voters just because the current most-active slice is susceptible to that kind of manipulation.
I estimate the time and materials they have spend since then to extract more money from me exceeds my original $50 contribution.
When I’m bored one day I’ll try to do a genealogy of how these addresses spread from sale to sale. But I don’t think I keep enough spam to get a cool picture.
I had this done to me many addresses ago and it’s bizarre how many mailers say something like “donate now so we can raise more donations because of terrible thing C”
I think the issue not covered in the nice article is that it’s not just coordination it’s competence. I think the reason why smart people don’t donate is that there’s not something to buy. If you have almond industry level funds to a cause it would like just result in a bunch of marathons and commercials. Smaller amounts, well placed seem much more effective.
I don't get why this is normalised. If fraudsters aren't doing this I'd be amazed. How hard is it to mock up an ID badge, get a clip board and start taking 'donations'.
I donated once to a charity via a text message, they phoned me back (told me it was a thank you call but obviously they wanted more), I told them never to call me again. That worked.
I'm on oxfam's list, I just asked them in-store to never send me any more crud, they got that put on the system, never got anything more again.
If there is a problem, fix it, don't hope it goes away.
The problem is, those overhead tasks don’t disappear just because you don’t spend money on them. Someone has to monitor the accounts, find new donors, calculate taxes, organize the holiday party. Centralizing these tasks in dedicated departments, hiring specialists, getting good at them, that would have looked like bureaucracy. So instead, we spun them out to the entire staff ... No one had any expertise in writing grant proposals, conducting impact assessments, or managing high-maintenance funders like the European Commission—training courses would have counted as overhead spending.
https://newrepublic.com/article/120178/problem-international...
Overhead is only inefficient if the charity isn't getting results. And charities that have low overhead but still don't get results are by definition still inefficient. Don't worry about overhead, focus on results.
Although in principle, if a charity were to spend 80% of its budget on fundraising, but per-dollar donated that charity gets the best results for saving children from dying of malaria or whatever, you really would refuse to donate to it?
I highly recommend reading the New Republic article I linked to, it talks about all this in a lot more detail.
So it’s easier for me to just filter by low absolute and relative overhead than try to figure out if they are paying too much for their paper or overpaying for motor pool and stuff like that.
Don't. Don't even do that. Don't try to determine their overhead at all. Just look at results, like the rate of malaria in children in the region.
Better to donate to a charity that stays in lavish hotels, parties all the time, and reduces the malaria rate by 20%, than a charity with no overhead, works super hard, pays their staff little, spends 95% of their budget on treatment, and still only reduces the malaria rate by 5%.
I’d rather donate to a charity that both has low overhead and reduces the malaria rate by 20%.
It’s not a good assumption to think that because a charity pays lavish salaries and stays in fancy hotels that it is somehow more effective.
I know our examples are made up but it’s pretty much impossible to tell if a single charity reduces the malaria rate. It’s pretty difficult in general to determine the impact of charities because unless you’re the Carter Foundation working on Guinea Worm there are lots of other factors and organizations contributing to a shared goal.
You're 100% right!
We should assume no such thing. We should measure whether it's more effective and reward that. Measuring and rewarding anything else creates perverse incentives, such as:
I’d rather donate to a charity that both has low overhead and reduces the malaria rate by 20%.
Really? If two charities deliver the same results, where one pays its staff minimally and spends the vast majority of its money on its treatment program, and the other pays and treats its staff well (lavishly, even) and spends less money on a more cost-effective treatment program, yielding the same ultimate results, then I'd say the former enriches more lives and deserves my money more.
When people say "no good deed goes unpunished", that's a joke because that's obviously not how we want the world to work. The world we want is one where bad deeds are punished and good deeds are rewarded.
We should prefer to donate to a charity that is as effective as alternatives but pays and treats its workers better, because the people who make those missions succeed deserve to be rewarded, not punished.
it’s pretty much impossible to tell if a single charity reduces the malaria rate ... there are lots of other factors and organizations contributing to a shared goal
That's why the article I linked to advocates randomized controlled trials, among other ideas.
My mother donated once to some Democratic volunteer who came to her door. They hounded her for more donations. She got mailings, phone calls, multiple people at her door. She vowed never to give them another cent.
Perhaps an unusually bad experience, but generally you do get punished this way for donating. I emptied my grandmother's mailbox when she became ill, and due to her charitable giving, it was absolutely crammed with political and charity mailings.