Answer This
Posted by Arwen Mosher in Just me on Monday, August 30, 2010 10:51 PM
Before the advent of the Do Not Call registry, I vaguely remember telemarketers calling the house a lot. My parents hated it.
These days it’s easier, since only charities can legally call and ask for money. But if you’re anything like us, those calls still come on a fairly regular basis.
We have caller ID, so it’s pretty easy to avoid talking to solicitors by screening the calls. Since some of them call up to five times a day until they finally get an answer, though, I prefer to pick up the phone and get rid of them as soon as possible.
I have in the past pledged money to charities over the phone, but learned later (through the website Charity Navigator) that the charities I’d supported were not efficient. One of them used 90% of its funds for overhead costs! So I decided we had to stop doing that.
Charity Navigator has a list of tips for dealing with calls from charities, but I generally take a simpler approach: when a charity calls, I tell them we have a policy of not giving money over the phone, ask if they have a website so I can research them further, then gently but firmly ask them to take us off their list. This method has been effective, mostly.
Tonight, though, I got a tough one: a guy who was calling for my husband, but was happy to ask me for money instead… until I told him I wouldn’t pledge over the phone, at which point he decided he’d call back later and talk to my husband. He then refused to take us off their call list and hung up on me.
Furious, I called back, hoping to talk to his supervisor. I got a recording instead, but discovered something cool: he’d been calling from an organization that charities hire to do their fundraising, and this particular one allowed me to opt out of their call list over the phone. I typed in our number and hung up, happy to have thwarted the rude guy.
I think from now on when I see an unfamiliar number on our caller ID, I’ll dial it. Maybe I can manage to opt out of more solicitations without actually having to talk to the callers!
Have you had victory over a rude telephone solicitor? Or, alternatively, ever connected with one in an unexpected way? How do you usually deal with them?
Photo courtesy Scott Waldron
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