Minding my own business...

There I was, minding my own business on friday afternoon, when the phone rang. Our landline doesn't ring that often, and, in fairness, when it DOES, it's generally a sales call, or one of those annoying messages telling me that I can avoid repaying debts (which I don't have, and which, if I did, I would have probably incurred fairly, and therefore should knuckle down and pay fairly, too) or somesuch nonsense. I ambled into the front room to answer it,and it turned out to be a chap from the RSPB, which was marginally more interesting than I had at first suspected, however, as we are regular donators (via a Direct Debit membership) to the Society, I had a feeling that it was not going to be simply a social call...

He politely asked if I had time to chat, and I confirmed that I did, and we chatted a bit about our reasons for joining, which reserves we visited (I mentioned Balranald being a favourite, which caused a moment or two of surprise - I don't think he was expecting that!) and the projects that the Society had ongoing at present. All very interesting stuff, but I was aware the whole time of the conversation building up to its point. I was curious to know how long this would take. Eventually he moved on to the question of our membership, being quick to assure us that they were "so grateful to people like us, who donate regularly like this" and then continued as I expected to ask if we were in a position to increase this at all. Now I know a lot of folk get really annoyed at this, but to be honest I don't have too much of a problem with it. I had every option to say I didn't have time to speak, and could at any point have cut him short...

...I explained that over the past few years our household income had taken a drop by about a third, and in fact we had come close at one stage to deciding that the RSPB membership was one of those little non-essentials that should go, but although we'd committed to maintaining our support, no, we couldn't spare any more money for them at the moment. All very reasonable, I took a conscious decision to explain precisely why we could not increase, and fully expected that, barring the pleasantries, that would be the end of the conversation. Sure enough, he assured me that of course he could understand our position entirely, and that was absolutely fine....

...then to my astonishment he said "what a lot of our members have been doing is increasing their donation by just a few pounds each month - do you think maybe that is something you could do?" I was quite seriously annoyed. So far as I was concerned I had been asked a straightforward question which I had answered honestly. To be asked a second time in spite of this just seemed like rudeness in the extreme. I mentally counted to ten whilst I stopped myself telling him precisely what I thought of his suggestion, and then calmly and rationally stated that I appreciated that he was almost certainly just following a script, but that I would appreciate if he could feed back to his superiors that to repeat this sort of request a second time when a perfectly concise reason for not being able to afford to donate more has been given was simply insensitive, and that continuing to harass people in this way would, in my view, lead to people being tempted to actually cancel their existing memberships.

So, what's your take on this sort of commercialised fundraising? It does seem somewhat cynical, particularly in the light of the fact that the phone call was made mid afternoon, at a time when presumably it is reasonable to assume that if the phone was even answered it was going to be an indicator of the fact that the person asking was not in full time work. In the event of receiving another of these calls from the RSPB in the future I would simply say that I did not have time to talk, and that would be that, but the whole thing has left me with a lingering bad taste...

Robyn