I Sent Coo-coo Mail to Sierra Club

Long time no blog! (Blogging in 2011? Tl;dr!) It's been a rough first half of 2011, to be honest. I'm not really myself. So you'll have to forgive me, but after coming home to yet another mailing from Sierra Club, I had to respond in a way that I knew would be recieved as crazy when it reached its destination. And I also had to share it with you. 

(unreadably small illustrative preview:)

Crazy mail, also known as scare mail or jail mail, is familiar to anyone who has worked at a magazine or in TV. It is reader or viewer mail sent by someone who is quite clearly crazy. You can easily tell because they fill up whole pages with writing veering off in all directions on the page, and it is crazy. 

First, the background.

Cooper the dog likes bears. I determined this from the time a nature show about bears was on TV and Cooper got very interested. This is relevant because when I first got a charity solitiation from Sierra Club, among many, many other items it contained a collection of postcards, and one of these postcards was a bear.

I posted the first bear next to Coopy's food bowl for his enjoyment, we occasionally got more solicitations from Sierra Club, and that was the end of it for a while until we moved. More recently, something kicked into overdrive at Siera Club HQ. The mailings were no longer occasional. Both myself and the hubbs got our own solicitations on a regular basis--it seemed they came every few weeks. It seemed downright aggressive. Only a few months into 2011 I had numerous bears-- and the bears don't even come in every mailing.

  
I get that a certain amount of each charity's expenses go to outreach. But outreach can only be affective in the right doses.

Here is a breakdown of the organization's annual expenses, as reported by Charity Navigator:

Expenses
Program Expenses	$41,016,345
Administrative Expenses	$867,676
Fundraising Expenses	$4,097,850
Total Functional Expenses	$45,981,871

We can probably assume these mailings fall under "fundraising." In addition to the nearly $4.1 million fundraising expense, though, is the waste. It's difficult to overlook that a charity purporting to protect the environment has no issue with regularly sending out to their mailing list envelopes stuffed with multiple pages of letters, along with multiples of each of the following: glossy inserts, vinyl decals, postcards, and greeting cards.

Now...far be it for me to claim a facility with numbers, but it seems to me that a reduction of the frequency and overall bulk of these mailings (say, by a third) could result in a significant amount of dollars that could go toward whatever work it is that the Sierra Club does for nature. I don' t even know because I've been too distracted by what they do against nature with their mailings. But surely it would help if they reduced the expenses of these mailings.

And so I started my small spiteful pushback on Sierra Club.

The first time, I stuffed all the donation soliciation and promotional materials back into the postage-paid envelope to send back to the organization on their dime. I incluced a letter declaring that they sent stuff too often, and they sent too much of it, asking them to stop. (I also mentioned keeping the bear.)

I thought the problem was solved, until another envelope packed with the usual stack of materials arrived today. Time to get a little more emphatic. (click photo to enlarge)

 

I stuffed everything including the envelope it arrived in, back into the postage-paid pre-addressed envelope. With a fume-issuing fat marker, I printed in block letters one word on each of the three remaining attached postcards (I took the bear): STOP / WASTING / PAPER! I signed it with an address label from the Nature Conservancy.

Then I sealed the outside of the envelope with address labels from all the other charities that send me shit and put another few on the front upper left corner just to have used one of each type.

(From what I've gathered, charity solicitation mail comes in two flavors: one flavor uses a lot of the color green, line drawings of leaves, and pictures of flowers and animals. That's mostly the kind I get. The other flavor favors the flag, eagles, and veterans in wheelchairs. I get the odd one or two of those due to my tendency to like old people and old things as indicated by my subscriptions to Reminisce and Preservation magazines.)

 Then I couldn't help adding all that exterior writing that looked so unhinged.

So that's how that happened. Next time they may get a brick mailed to them using the postage paid envelope, and after that, a cinder block.

 

 

 

Comments

[Apollo!]

Glad to see you posting again. I really, really wish I had thought of this before I threw away that damned mailer. They are getting crazy! I think I get the mailers here in Huntsville AND at my Dad's house in Birmingham. WHAT THE FUCK, Y'ALL? At least I'll never run out of address stickers.

[Colleen Kane]

Thanks man! I'll be posting again soon about my latest big abandoned mission. And yes, I too will never run out of address labels. Especially since I hardly pay any bills by snail mail anymore.

[Coach Factory]

WHAT THE FUCK, Y'ALL? At least I'll never run out of address stickers.

[Kartek]

I get my fair share of mailings myself. It's really a shame that all that paper is wasted for their solicitation for money. Nevermind the mailings, Sierra Club hasn't done much to impress me. They complain and complain but I'm not sure what they've actually accomplished. I rather donate to organizations that preserve land or actually do something.

[Outlet Ralph Lauren]

I will recommend my friends to read this. I am quite sure they will learn lots of new stuff here than anybody else

[[coach outlet]]

Thanks man! I'll be posting again soon about my latest big abandoned mission.