Something happened this week that really puzzled me. As I've posted before, the Charity of the Week program on OldMaidCatLady.com kicks off next week and I'm very excited about it. Each featured charity will get a blurb on my site that explains what they do to help cats, and will receive 10% of my profits that week. They get a little money to help their cause and some publicity in their community; I get some new people introduced to my new retail site; everybody wins, right?
This week, I've been touching base with my June charities to confirm that they've received my earlier communications and see if they need any additional help from me to promote the event to their local communities. So imagine my surprise when the executive director of one told me that they were not interested in participating! It seems that they were only interested if I was going to make a donation to them without anything being done on their part; just write them a check, essentially. I was so taken aback that I couldn't even question her further to see what her objection was.
And here I was, thinking that non-profits were off in donations due to the slower economy! I guess that's no longer true, and they're now able to turn away fundraising opportunities that don't require them to organize any events or do anything more than a little publicity work that'll also give them some news coverage for their cause. I'd thought that being selected as one of my Charities of the Week was an honor, and that people would be happy about it. This woman acted like it was an annoyance with which she couldn't be bothered. Her reaction caused me to wonder about whether I'm completely off-base altogether with offering this to local non-profits. I've scheduled one for each week of the next year; will others have the same ungrateful reaction?
If you have a non-profit group that helps cats in some sort of grassroots way, send me your info. In the event that any other of my selected charities has the same attitude as this one and I have an opening in my schedule, I'll plug you into a week. It's great that some non-profits don't need additional donations, but I'm betting that others would welcome them.
This week, I've been touching base with my June charities to confirm that they've received my earlier communications and see if they need any additional help from me to promote the event to their local communities. So imagine my surprise when the executive director of one told me that they were not interested in participating! It seems that they were only interested if I was going to make a donation to them without anything being done on their part; just write them a check, essentially. I was so taken aback that I couldn't even question her further to see what her objection was.
And here I was, thinking that non-profits were off in donations due to the slower economy! I guess that's no longer true, and they're now able to turn away fundraising opportunities that don't require them to organize any events or do anything more than a little publicity work that'll also give them some news coverage for their cause. I'd thought that being selected as one of my Charities of the Week was an honor, and that people would be happy about it. This woman acted like it was an annoyance with which she couldn't be bothered. Her reaction caused me to wonder about whether I'm completely off-base altogether with offering this to local non-profits. I've scheduled one for each week of the next year; will others have the same ungrateful reaction?
If you have a non-profit group that helps cats in some sort of grassroots way, send me your info. In the event that any other of my selected charities has the same attitude as this one and I have an opening in my schedule, I'll plug you into a week. It's great that some non-profits don't need additional donations, but I'm betting that others would welcome them.
