Does anybody have firsthand inside experience in the charity industry?
Specifically, I am wondering if there are one or more central databases where donors and prospective donors are tracked.
From the outside it looks to me like the name/address of somebody in our family is in one of these databases and every time they respond to a solicitation, the point value assigned to them is incremented.
Then it looks like various charities that subscribe to that database service put together mailings based on that point value.
The good-hearted person in question doesn't have a suspicious bone in their body and routinely sends $20-$25 to charities I've never heard of and the contents of our mailbox keeps growing and growing with solicitations form more and more "Charities".
Quotes because every so often I get all spun up and I spot check some of them against
Yesterday, the mailman was barely able to fit it all into the box - and this is a pretty good-sized box.
Also the apparent commitment of charities to individual mailings seems to have gone up. Now we are getting dollar bills, checks for $2.00, and coins in some mailings - predicated, I guess, on pushing some people's "Obligation" buttons. Maybe this hypothetical database service is sophisticated enough keep score by the types of solicitations and which buttons they push?
So: does my hypothesis about the central database hold water?