If any government--Canadian or U.S., provincial or state--truly wanted to see solopreneurs morph into the "job creators" worshiped by politicians, they'd forbid all non-registered (cough!) "charities" (cough!) from cold-calling anyone. Let 'em set up an IndieGoGo campaign and hustle on social media if they don't even care enough about the cause to get out of the office and network. Bonus points for fining anyone who donates to these "charities" by dinging them the same amount on their taxes.
Harsh? Maybe. (Of course, if I had my druthers, the government would also run sting operations to out anyone responding (positively) to spam. It's the 21st century equivalent of putting miscreants in the stocks out in the public square. A little humiliation would go a long way, particularly for the species of prat who expects the internet to deliver a Russian bride and a matching case of Cialis. The market would eventually dry up and spammers would have to get real jobs. Or so we can hope.)
I'm not going to mention any names of this morning's pitch. I will say that my reaction--prefaced by something unprintable--was "...they have that scam going in Canada, too?!?!" (And, yes, I did use the CRA's Registered Charities search; these folks are, naturally, nowhere in evidence.)
When you knock me out of The Zone--in which I actually move ahead on work instead of just keep up with the administrivia, I'm going to be owly. When you give me cause to reflect that some scams can have a lifespan of 200+ years, it doesn't help. But when, for one galling moment, you make me share Ayn Rand's contempt for charities, it's almost enough to hulk out over. And then it takes me even longer to settle back into The Zone.
But it's not just my personal objections I'm here to blog about. Cold-calling (or blasting out emails by the thousand at a time) for donations to a sketchy charity does not add value. At best, it merely shuffles money straight between bank accounts. At worst, it diverts potential funding from organisations that actually do provide value by serving the under-served, and/or funding research a private sector is too
I mean, not only do such professional fund-raisers thoroughly suck at charity, their business model itself is blatently lame and unimaginative--and, I posit to my Gentle Reader, not at all the point of capitalism and its vaunted processes of creative destruction. Let's break down the model, shall we?
- Pick a tug-at-the-heartstrings cause (e.g. The Sick Baby Unicorn Foundation).
- Pack a call centre with min. wage employees to read from scripts. (Bonus points for setting up where the law allows you to jank their pay around with "incentives.")
- Skim off 95+% of the proceeds for "administrative" and "fundraising" expenses
- Profit!
I mean, seriously, the Harper Government is perfectly happy to use the CRA as its goons. Why is it wasting time on environmental groups when the threat to the tar sands is thousands of miles off an outside its control anyway? Geeze, do tomorrow's job-creators a solid and get these time-wasting grifters off our backs. The only thing they're "disrupting" is my concentration--and, by definition, my productivity.
