I donated blood for 25 years in Italy (I can’t anymore due to health reasons). Here we have a semi-public organization (AVIS - Italian Blood Volunteers Association) that handles donation and distribution. Zero stress, no “pushy” reminders, everything is completely voluntary. The trick is that by donating blood you receive your blood test results (a very comprehensive panel). It’s a mutually beneficial “do ut des” arrangement that is highly appreciated (and it helped me detect a serious issue at an early stage).

In addition, AVIS is a very community-oriented volunteer association that builds a sense of belonging and awareness.

Organized this way, the system works.

One of my favourite criticisms, yes their procedure works, but it probably doesn't measure rejection rates. "We hounded these 1000 people for a donation, 60% responded favourably". Okay, but out of the 40% that didn't respond how many are you never going to see again? Who were those 40%?

My wife works in a line of business where up-selling is a debated issue. Most of the industry thinks it's good, because they see more sales on the products that are being pushed, but they never measure how many people are actively turned off by the aggressive sales tactics and won't return in the future and now buys absolutely nothing.

It's baffling to me that organisations never measure negative impact from campaigns, because maybe you're pushing away the wrong people. E.g. maybe your most reliable patrons are the most adverse to your campaign and now you have to work even hard to reach your goals next time, as these people are not coming back?

Nobody likes the feeling of being hunted.

I really appreciate their comment describing their overreaction on a post about people overreacting when asked for donations. Goes a long way to prove TFA's point

I tend to mark them as spam (and hope that it causes them problems send email) if I didn't explicitly sign up for them. I'm not going to be polite about it if they aren't.

Of course, recurring payments work completely differently. A shockingly large fraction of recurring payments are from people who never got around to cancelling it. They're already getting what they want, any email just risks disturbing this situation.

Why is that disgusting? That's an extremely common revenue stream for charities. I know some charities where the majority of their income is derived from wills.

How do people notice that? I'm sometimes reading about that here, but in reality I never ran into an issue where I couldn't find anything any more or that I often re-visit the same article and would notice changes.

Same with political donations in the US. I gave to one campaign 10 years ago and I've been getting consistent requests for donations since. So now they all get marked as spam.

The first one came right after my donation.

I guess it works for them but it's crazy to me that all these orgs basically make you regret ever donating in the first place.

Ironically, though, I've donated to Wikipedia and they've never bothered me more.

Edit: I'm not implying they wouldn't bother you, though! I have no idea.