Many years ago I used return address labels from the National Wildlife Federation and other nature- and medicine-based charities. Then I started printing my own labels using the Avery system of buying blank sticky labels and printing them at home with my name and address. The last time I tried that, the process was hellishly frustrating, ending with the paper jamming in my printer and the sticky labels tangled in the gears. I vowed in the future to buy directly from charities again.
But where? A quick search this morning wasn't productive. And my understanding of most label-printing services (like the Walmart pictured above) is that my $$ goes to Walmart or the check-printing company and not to the charity. My "support" for the charity thus becomes having their name or logo microprinted on the label.
I wonder if any readers are purchasing return address labels from charities.
My aunt used to donate to Disabled Veterans of America and they always included personalized return address labels with their mailings. St. Jude Children’s Hospital, March of Dimes and the ASPCA also used to send labels. We’ve had to cut back on charitable giving after we retired so I don’t have any current personal info, sadly.
ReplyDeleteI have been donating to Wounded Warriors and they always send return address labels back. I'm even happy they get the names right: some of the charities use only my husband or myself on the label, which irks me, so I don't use theirs.
DeleteI know there's a Wounded Warrior Family charity that applies almost all of your contribution to their cause, so there's no bling.
Concur with this. Can add others to this list: Nat'l Audubon Society, American Red Cross, UNICEF.
DeleteBeware ASPCA, and UNICEF. My experience was, I donated to each of them *once* and they relentlessly sent me mail - multiple times/month! - for the next 3? 4? years. Not making judgments on how good a charity each may be, but I don't hold a positive opinion now, on how they spent my $$! (And, certainly not worth it for the labels, IMHO.)
YMMV, of course.
Charities !
ReplyDeleteBeing a stalwart animal lover, I used to donate to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) but stopped when I found out that the CEO of that organisation was paid in excess of a million dollars a year.
An ex-partner's mother, working high up in a woman's charity, quit her job in protest to the amount of money from the donations used to enhance the charity's upper echelon's lives.
These days I do my charity work directly to the animals, I house many rescue cats, and every night I drive around various places in my town feeding the stray and abandoned felines ... my trust in other people near totally eroded.
The ASPCA (American Soci...) CEO was getting paid $1.2 million. Also, I think I read only 30% of donations actually get spent on animals and the rest go on admin, with a huge chunk of that being ads and promotions.
DeleteIf I understand correctly SPCA is a blanket term for local animal charities who, in general, receive no money from the ASPCA. So your local Bumnott, Nowhere SPCA charity might have a scummy guy in charge taking 90% of the donations or she could be an angel and everyone works for free. These are your actual local charities - and I think they all still have to file returns.
Donating to the ASPCA does not, in general and as far as I can see, help many animals get rehomed.
Curiously if you try to Google a list of charities that pass on the most of their donations to actual charity you'll find an awful lot of blog posts saying how important it is for charities to spend money on administration to maximise the amount received. I wonder whose promotions budget paid for those posts.
When charity covers everything from paying millions of dollars for a top college football coach (to a team that works for free, who get scholarships in an academic institution worth billions) to crowd-funding cancer care for someone who worked in the comics industry for decades but can't afford his own health care, you gotta wonder where it went wrong.
Anyone know where there's a list showing charities ranked by percentage spent on admin vs promotion vs actual charity?
Google recommended Charity Navigator which gives a star rating based on how well the financial paperwork is filled in, Charity Watch that wants you to pay a subscription and Candid which I honestly don't understand the figures because the amount shown going towards programs seems so low.
It really feels like if you've heard of a charity, and it isn't local, it's probably a very efficient means of extracting money from people some of which will go on charity programs, but most of which will go to maintain the machine that turns donations into salaries.
I mainly give to fairly low key, specialised charities like Special Effect in the UK which has shown to give about 90% of donations to their programs (in this game providing specialised gaming peripherals to disabled kids). It's not going to change the world but it's going to bring a lot of localised joy to special children.
"I wonder if any readers are purchasing return address labels from charities."
DeleteThere's a post office in the supermarket that sells the hash brown bites I like. That's about as close as I get to sending letters or parcels these days.
blog posts saying how important it is for charities to spend money on administration to maximise the amount received
DeleteI've always found that at a remarkably self-serving argument that gets repeated with very little critical evidence. Many charities turn into professional money-raising machines that provide its leadership with a nice life full of fun events while paying lip-service to the actual charity, while most of the good work gets done by unpaid volunteers.
Charities that pay their leadership high salaries are missing the point.
One of the joys of freezing my credit report is that I do not get contacted by credit card and mortgage companies and charities anymore. That saves a lot of paper. A disadvantage is that I do not get all the free return address labels from charities with their solicitation mail.
ReplyDeleteAnd frustratingly, World Central Kitchen is true to their word that they never harass me for more money. Not even with mail with address return labels! How dare they!
BTW I've never seen return address labels back home. I'm curious if international readers can help us understand if they are an American thing, or if the Dutch are simply and stereotypically too cheap.
Perhaps the Dutch postal system is more efficient, and letters never need to be returned to sender...
DeleteI have a drawer full of address labels sent from charities I never donate to because charities I do donate to sell my address to mailing lists. Try donating to some of the larger charities and address labels will start flowing.
ReplyDeleteThat seems to be an eminently practical suggestion. Unfortunately World Central Kitchen is not a return-address-label distributor, and they may not sell their donor lists (not sure about that, but I have not been flooded with solicitations since embracing WCK).
DeleteSusan G. Komen and St. Jude Children's both do.
ReplyDeleteI personally put aside my religious objections and contribute to St. Jude. They support children and families from diagnosis to adulthood without charging the families. They also don't keep their discoveries as cash cows and share them with the world.
We donate to Wounded Warrior Project, and receive plenty of labels, along with other bling.
ReplyDeleteSend $5 to the Environmental Defense Fund and those bozos will send you labels every six months with their requests for more money. And they will do this year after year. In other words, the EDF is a scam for turning $5 into $50 worth of pollution.
ReplyDeleteOver the years I've received tons of labels and as I haven't moved in 40 years, they're good as long as the glue lasts. I've gotten labels from The Nature Conservancy and recently from The Pine Tree Society of Maine that provides services for children and adults with special needs. For those attempting to learn about charities, I've found a lot of information on Charity Navigator about how each charity uses the funds they receive, including executive compensation.
ReplyDeleteI have something like this:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsShY_GGxys
but I haven't used it in a while, due to the abovementioned free labels from random charities.
You can also print your own, and avoid issues matching templates by just making a multicolumn document in your word processor or spreadsheet, and printing it on a full-page label, which may make it through your printer easier than a sheet of labels. Then cut the labels out manually as needed.
Interesting options. Thank you, anon.
DeleteWow. It sound a lot less straightforward than I hoped. Maybe I'll just take a chance on feeding another sheet of gummed labels into the printer again. Worst case scenario - cruise eBay for a replacement used Canon Pixma printer for $30.
ReplyDelete