Paper Chase

A retired Florida man is on a quixotic campaign to reduce the volume of charity mail solicitations

To most Americans, mail solicitations are an annoying, but understandable, part of life. While they may clog up the mailbox, they are necessary for the survival of many charities.

But to Bernard (Ole) Olson, such appeals are not worth the paper they are printed on.

For 14 years, the 80-year-old Floridian has waged a one-man crusade against the envelopes that show up at his door seeking cash.

As a form of protest, every January he tallies how many letters he has received during the previous year from charities, noting which organizations they are from and how much he would have to give if he met the minimum amount of each request. As part of this effort to indict the mailers of the solicitations, he has sent a summary of his findings to friends, the news media, and charity watchdogs.

To be sure, Mr. Olson doesn’t disdain giving to charities; he supports more than two dozen groups.

But what he dislikes is that his generosity has spurred requests from so many other organizations, and that his contact information has very likely been swapped among fund raisers.

177 Appeals This Year

The quixotic hobby to track the appeals began after Mr. Olson retired.

“I just was so ticked off. I said, Well, let me see just how many there are,” says Mr. Olson, who worked for the U.S. Navy’s post-exchange system for 24 years.

He wrote his first report in 1993 when 70 nonprofit groups sent him 197 pieces of mail. In years since, the reams of fund-raising letters have only grown. Last year, he received 276 solicitations from 104 groups, and in 2005 — the “banner year,” says Mr. Olson dryly — he had an eye-popping 388 appeals that requested at least $8,076.

This year, appeals continue to give Mr. Olson’s mailman a workout. Mr. Olson has received 177 charity notes so far — and that’s before the usual crush of holiday appeals.

“I would really like them to cut back,” Mr. Olson says, sounding almost desperate.

His 2006 report, a simple three-page document produced on a Hewlett-Packard computer in his Port St. Lucie home, also lists the random gifts charities dole out to lure donors: five greetings cards from an Alzheimer’s research group, three cross necklaces from a Christian charity, a desk calendar from an arts organization, two notepads from the Shriners, three key tags from the American Diabetes Association, a map from Unicef.

He occasionally finds some use for the freebies — he gives calendars to friends — but one piece of charity swag always has Mr. Olson seeing red.

“What really ticks me off is that I get so many address labels,” he complains. “Last year I received over 2,600 address labels, which would take over seven years to use if I used one each day.”

USO Mailings

A recent target of his ire is the United Services Organization, the nonprofit group that arranges entertainment events to raise the morale of U.S. soldiers. After the Washington charity sent him 15 requests for money last year, he wrote an angry missive to the chairman of the Joints Chief of Staff at the Pentagon. Mr. Olson says he’s still waiting for a reply.

(The United Services Organization says that it would no longer send mail to Mr. Olson if he contacted the group directly and that the 15 solicitations he received was a mistake.)

Other charities get complaints, too. If any of his nonprofit suitors do not meet the standards of the Better Business Bureau’s Wise Giving Alliance, or have declined to be evaluated by it, he sends a terse note asking to be removed from their mailing lists.

Most do as he asks; a few send apologies.

For his hobby, Mr. Olson says the Better Business Bureau’s ratings are “handy,” though the watchdog has not taken a shine to his solicitation tally, Mr. Olson says. For several years he sent his tally to the charity evaluators, but no longer. “I never got a reply, never got a thank you,” he says, “so I figured if they’re not interested, to hell with them.”

The Wise Giving Alliance, in Alexandria, Va., says the snub was unintentional. The group tries to respond to all the letters it receives, but with such a large volume of complaints about charities and other mail, apparently Mr. Olson’s slipped through, says Bennett Weiner, the watchdog’s chief operating officer.

Other people, however, have taken a large interest in Mr. Olson’s work.

Glenn Henderson, a columnist for The Palm Beach Post, in Florida, has dubbed Mr. Olson the “czar of unwanted solicitations” and has featured him in two columns. Mr. Henderson says the “czar” speaks for a lot of Florida’s older residents, who are especially frustrated by charity requests.

“We get loads of stuff here that fills up mailboxes,” the columnist says. “As Ole can attest to, once you pay money to one outfit, it seems the word gets out and they can smell the blood.”

Continuing to Give

Despite Mr. Olson’s anger toward fund-raising appeals, he continues to donate to charities. Last year, he contributed a little more than $1,300 to 29 groups.

One of the beneficiaries of his generosity, the American Heart Association, seems to have learned how to butter up Mr. Olson. The charity has a policy of limiting the amount of mail it sends if it knows a donor does not want a lot of appeals in a year.

Mr. Olson gave the organization $60 in 2006, during which the Dallas nonprofit group sent exactly one letter to him — no calendars, no holiday cards, no key tags, and, for darn sure, no address labels.

Even in charity direct mail, it seems, sometimes less is more.