The front page headline in The Times is Crackdown on Chuggers. Since its disappearance behind a paywall I only get to see The Times when one of us has been to Waitrose or I've been round to my parents' house, but the Systems Administrator who has picked up the culinary baton again went grocery shopping this morning. And managed to get everything on my list, including cornflour, other than green lentils. I am in favour of chuggers being cracked down on, having almost been run down by a taxi the other day as I plotted my course to avoid two of them while crossing Grays Inn Road. There has to be a better way of charities signing up new donors than flagging people down on the pavement when they are in the middle of getting on with their day, and I'd like to see chugging outlawed. Not bona fide volunteers with collecting tins: I happily buy my poppy and stick my quid in the lifeboat box, but the creepily grinning youngsters in coloured tabards who dart at you across the pavement, clipboards in hand.
They call it capturing your data, a predatory metaphor that ought to make management think again about quite what they think they're doing. I had mine captured recently, and was not pleased about it. A member of the beekeepers died a while back, of cancer, and his family suggested we sell what we could of some of his equipment and donate the proceeds to a cancer charity. Once we'd sold everything we thought we were going to, I totted up the proceeds and sent a cheque from the beekeeping division to one of the major cancer research charities, explaining that it was in memory of a former member who had died of cancer, and signing the letter off as Treasurer. I got a nice letter of thanks back, which I read out to the Committee, and thought no more about it.
Until a couple of months later I got a fund raising letter from that same charity, asking me to donate to an appeal. Asking me, that is, not the beekeepers. I sent a short and polite email to the address given on the letter, explaining that I thought they had taken my name and address from the letter I had written to them on behalf of the beekeepers, and requesting they remove my details from their database as I had only written to them before in my capacity as an officer of a small local organisation, and while I was sure they did good work I already supported as many charities as I could afford.
I got a standard automated reply, followed a couple of days later by an email thanking me for taking the time to get in touch, saying that they were always pleased to hear from their supporters, apologising for adding my details to their system, and assuring me that this was only so that they could track any future donations or communications from me. And they had removed my details as requested, though I might get a few more appeals that were already in the pipeline before letters stopped arriving.
The bit about only wanting to track any future donations or communications was clearly nonsense, since they had just written to me asking for money. I emailed again, slightly more tartly than the first time, to say that I was glad they had taken my details off their database as requested, but I thought they had fundamentally missed the point of my first email, which was that writing to them in my role as Treasurer of an organisation and enclosing a cheque made out on the bank account of that organisation did not in any way make me personally a 'supporter' and that they should not take the opportunity to record my personal details then start asking me for money, nor any other Treasurer or Chairman that sent them a donation.
After another automated reply I got a second email, this time from somebody signing herself Complaints Executive, who said that she understood my concerns about the way my details had been captured, and that my comments and concerns had been logged so that they can be used for the future. I hope they are, though I have my doubts. The Supporter Contact Adviser who replied to my first email seemed so completely clueless that I fear they have a long way to go before respect for personal privacy is ingrained in the culture. When your aim is noble, the end justifies the means, doesn't it? Who could resent receiving an appeal from such a good cause?
I probably sound like a miserable cow for complaining, instead of simply chucking their letter in the recycling bin and forgetting about it, or asking them to remove my name from their database so that they wouldn't waste money on mail shots and leaving it at that. But the way that large charities are half way across the room if you allow them a foot in the door annoys me, having seen for myself the way that one elderly relative is subject to an absolute barrage of charity letters and phone calls. They need reining in, good work or no good work.
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