Pledge

Each month, I send a donation to the local Public Broadcasting System  TV station and National Public Radio station. Both are housed at Texas Tech University, KTTZ http://www.kttz.org/. They used to be separate entities:  KOHM-FM radio and KTXT-TV.  I discovered years ago that I could send one check and they each got the designated share.

I originally had donated through the fund drive, and even received donor gifts.  Then, I kept giving. One year, I received a donor gift that I tried to return, but was not accepted!  The boxes were returned to me as "undeliverable."  So weird. 

So, I keep donating. I do not pledge my donation, and  I do not want to be recorded as making a pledge.  I just want to donate.

A couple of years ago, I received a thank you note and 12 pre-addressed envelopes "for my convenience."  I used those.

Recently, the two stations have been administratively merged and changed from their old call letters to KTTZ.  This makes sense to me, on many levels.  Also, Texas Tech announced that they will eventually pull their funding from both stations.  That prompted me to decide to redirect my donation:  Per their past instructions, I was sending the donation to the Tech Development Office. The money was being credited correctly, because I received monthly thank you and receipt acknowledgements. So, this past month, I sent my check directly to the station office.

I received back a pledge card for each station, one dating back to a pledge starting last September, one dated as my pledge just started.  This infuriated me.  I am not sure why I was so angry, but I did not make a pledge to either station, and I do not want to be on the books as having made a pledge.

I was ugly:  I returned the pledge cards with a note that I have not made a pledge and if I keep getting pledge cards, I will stop my donation.  I do not want to stop my donation. I just do not want to be told that I have made a commitment that I have not made. I think that is inappropriate. That is like getting a bill for something you did not buy.

I also donate regularly to some charitable organizations and animal welfare non-profits.  From time to time, I donate to other organizations: for a special event or reason, or to acknowledge or honor someone or someone's  pet.   Those organizations sometimes continue to send me requests for money.  I usually ignore them. I have decided that I will answer each one with a request to be taken off their mailing list, noting that if I have a reason to donate to them, I know how to do that. 

I am not trying to be ugly.  I just think that I do not need to receive what I perceive as junk mail, and I am doing the organization a favor by not letting them spend money and resources on trying to get money out of me.