April 11, 2008 | Read Time: 1 minute
Too many charity appeals and follow-up correspondence are filled with careless and insensitive mistakes, writes Charles Longsworth, former president of Hampshire College and a veteran fund raiser and board member, in an opinion piece in The Chronicle of Philanthropy.
Mr. Longsworth says that in recent months, he and his wife, whom he describes as “generous and easy marks,” have made several donations to charities that were completely ignored or responded to with form letters, thank-you notes misspelling their names, and other mistakes.
In one case, soon after he left the board of a charity, he received a solicitation letter from another trustee there addressed to “Mr. and Mrs. Longsworth” that the board member didn’t even bother to sign.
“If it had been personally addressed, actually signed, and perhaps, had included a personal note like ‘We miss seeing you,’ even if not true, we may have sent another gift,” writes Mr. Longsworth. “A lot of good and useful institutions are not optimizing their fund-raising opportunities. They are impersonal, careless, and seemingly uncaring about those on whom they so depend.”
