Giving can be hard

One thing that charities often seem to like to do is give you discounts on things they sell or events they run. This is a nice way of saying thank you but if you’re trying to give them money it’s not always something you want to take advantage of. Sometimes it’s surprisingly difficult to convince them if this which always seemed counterproductive on their part – “You’re a charity. This is a fundraising event. I want to give you money – why are you making this hard?”.

Of course, that’s less of a problem than the magazines most insist on sending you – pretty much all of the ones I get go straight to recycling, serving nobody, while you can always donate some other way. I can see the argument that they keep you in touch with what the organization is doing and so on but I’m happy to do that via other means (like the Internet) or, often, not at all. Honestly, I’m really not that interested in the details of the new RNLI lifeboats but I do think they’re a jolly good idea.