Help me donate money (without getting on random donor lists)
July 4, 2024 9:03 AM Subscribe
Inspired by this question below, I'd also like to donate money to candidates I support, but doing this always seems to trigger a flurry of fundraising emails from that candidate and a pile of others. (Just before primaries this year, I was somehow auto-subscribed to the Substack of a candidate I'd never even heard of.)
Is there a way to refuse the option for being contacted or added to lists? Is there a national list you can sign up for like the Do Not Call list? Is a throwaway/spam email the only solution?
Thanks, everyone.
Is there a way to refuse the option for being contacted or added to lists? Is there a national list you can sign up for like the Do Not Call list? Is a throwaway/spam email the only solution?
Thanks, everyone.
Throwaway email is what I used. I created a separate gmail account with a google voice number and then donated using that. I then let the voice number expire. I never check the email account except at times like this when I think about it. Hey look 1046 messages I missed!
Unfortunately, one time my browser auto-filled my real number and now I can't get the messages to stop. That number must have been sold on 100 times now.
posted by procrastination at 10:07 AM on July 4 [2 favorites]
Unfortunately, one time my browser auto-filled my real number and now I can't get the messages to stop. That number must have been sold on 100 times now.
posted by procrastination at 10:07 AM on July 4 [2 favorites]
Do any of the candidates have an address where you can mail a check? Get a PO Box for a return address, mail your check, wait to see that it clears, close PO Box. No email required and the junk mail goes straight to the trash.
posted by blnkfrnk at 10:13 AM on July 4 [2 favorites]
posted by blnkfrnk at 10:13 AM on July 4 [2 favorites]
Use a secondary email; I give a google voice number. Political donations must be identified, to increase transparency/reduce corruption (don't get me started). Do not give a fake name or address. Political information is not covered by Do Not Call, etc., because Free Speech. Campaigns are legit with unsubscribe, in my experience.
I get occasional texts from the Biden campaign and several emails a day. Somebody sold my number and I get wacky untrue texts that show me what the opposition is capable of, sigh.
posted by theora55 at 10:14 AM on July 4 [5 favorites]
I get occasional texts from the Biden campaign and several emails a day. Somebody sold my number and I get wacky untrue texts that show me what the opposition is capable of, sigh.
posted by theora55 at 10:14 AM on July 4 [5 favorites]
I use a different approach, always donating under the same email that is NOT a throw-away. Then when I review that email box during election season only (at most) one of any solicitation survives. For instance, the President, my Senator, my House Rep can email me all they want, and I "star" in Thunderbird the first one (if any) that I consider giving to. Each new one from the same person gets deleted by me. As you point out, they hound us all too often, so each new email will not be far from the one they did 4 hours ago, and deletion is easy.
Of course sometimes I get solicitations from somebody thousands of miles away (I'm looking at you Gov. Newsom) and they NEVER get a star.
Eventually I decide to give to some of them, and once I do, I delete even those "starred" emails. It's like Darwinian evolution kind of. FWIW. YMMV.
posted by forthright at 6:30 PM on July 4 [1 favorite]
Of course sometimes I get solicitations from somebody thousands of miles away (I'm looking at you Gov. Newsom) and they NEVER get a star.
Eventually I decide to give to some of them, and once I do, I delete even those "starred" emails. It's like Darwinian evolution kind of. FWIW. YMMV.
posted by forthright at 6:30 PM on July 4 [1 favorite]
If you make a political donation then the donation amount, date, and recipient plus your name, residential address, occupation, and employer become public information.
Legally and morally, you should not give false answers to those specific parts of the donation form because that information being both true and public is essential to campaign finance transparency.
Any additional contact information or personal information beyond the FEC-mandated items (name, residential address, occupation, employer) requested by the campaign is just the campaign's own data collection process.
Campaigns sell and swap their databases with political listbrokers like L2, Nationbuilder, etc. Those listbrokers combine the FEC-mandated donation fields (public info), voter registration information (public info), history of which elections you've voted in (public info), any extra information the campaign collected on you, and consumer profiles bought from non-political marketing databases to create very detailed voter/donor profiles of individual people. Other political campaigns can then buy these profiles and use the information in them to contact you.
In addition to the nonpartisan/multipartisan political listbrokers, the Democrats have their own partisan database NGP-VAN. If you have ever donated to a Democratic candidate then you have a profile in NGP-VAN, and all future political donations to anyone will most likely be linked to your NGP-VAN profile even if the campaign you donated to isn't using NGP-VAN.
While you could start using a throwaway email address for future donations, the genie is already out of the bottle. You already exist in the political listbrokers' databases and in NGP-VAN. They will be able to match enough fields from your new donations to dedupe you into the existing profile. Your real email address was already part of that profile, and thus your real email address will continue to be sold along with the new donation info. The databases are sophisticated enough that emails are a one-to-many field, so giving them a different email address is more "spam me here too" than "spam me here instead."
Consistently using throwaway email addresses might still produce some marginal reduction of spam to your real email address over time because some campaigns might only pay to send emails to most recent known good email instead of to all known emails for your profile. The difference is a few pennies, but if they're sending emails to millions of people at once then the pennies per person savings add up.
TL;DR sorry but any email address you've ever used for a political donation is effectively marked for life. It will continue to be linked to all future donations regardless of what email address you use for each individual donation.
Source: I was a professional political textbank wrangler 2016-2020 and routinely bought and swapped political database records. Some of my specifics might be outdated, but the general gist of how it works should still be true.
posted by Jacqueline at 2:22 AM on July 5 [4 favorites]
Legally and morally, you should not give false answers to those specific parts of the donation form because that information being both true and public is essential to campaign finance transparency.
Any additional contact information or personal information beyond the FEC-mandated items (name, residential address, occupation, employer) requested by the campaign is just the campaign's own data collection process.
Campaigns sell and swap their databases with political listbrokers like L2, Nationbuilder, etc. Those listbrokers combine the FEC-mandated donation fields (public info), voter registration information (public info), history of which elections you've voted in (public info), any extra information the campaign collected on you, and consumer profiles bought from non-political marketing databases to create very detailed voter/donor profiles of individual people. Other political campaigns can then buy these profiles and use the information in them to contact you.
In addition to the nonpartisan/multipartisan political listbrokers, the Democrats have their own partisan database NGP-VAN. If you have ever donated to a Democratic candidate then you have a profile in NGP-VAN, and all future political donations to anyone will most likely be linked to your NGP-VAN profile even if the campaign you donated to isn't using NGP-VAN.
While you could start using a throwaway email address for future donations, the genie is already out of the bottle. You already exist in the political listbrokers' databases and in NGP-VAN. They will be able to match enough fields from your new donations to dedupe you into the existing profile. Your real email address was already part of that profile, and thus your real email address will continue to be sold along with the new donation info. The databases are sophisticated enough that emails are a one-to-many field, so giving them a different email address is more "spam me here too" than "spam me here instead."
Consistently using throwaway email addresses might still produce some marginal reduction of spam to your real email address over time because some campaigns might only pay to send emails to most recent known good email instead of to all known emails for your profile. The difference is a few pennies, but if they're sending emails to millions of people at once then the pennies per person savings add up.
TL;DR sorry but any email address you've ever used for a political donation is effectively marked for life. It will continue to be linked to all future donations regardless of what email address you use for each individual donation.
Source: I was a professional political textbank wrangler 2016-2020 and routinely bought and swapped political database records. Some of my specifics might be outdated, but the general gist of how it works should still be true.
posted by Jacqueline at 2:22 AM on July 5 [4 favorites]
I wrote a blog post about this a few years ago. Jacqueline is right: do not give any contact info out that's not legally required. Do not ever give out a phone number or email, the FEC does not mandate their disclosure. Email is sometimes impossible to avoid because a website demands it to make an account. I use a +burner email address for that.
Jacqueline is also right that you are marked for life in the databases. You don't even have to give them your email address once: they'll get that from marketing databases and match it to your other profile info. I've managed to get control back in Gmail by aggressively creating filter rules to drop all email from campaigns. About once a week someone new sneaks through. Also in general the unsubscribe or stop-to-end options with each specific campaign do work, the problem is new campaigns keep putting you on new lists. Some of the fundraising platforms like EveryAction have product-wide opt-outs that help with that.
The advice above is for political donations. For non-profits it's usually not so bad, they generally respect your no contact wishes. You can also set up a Donor Advised Fund to offer yourself some anonymity but that's complicated and implies you're donating a large amount of money.
posted by Nelson at 6:53 AM on July 5 [2 favorites]
Jacqueline is also right that you are marked for life in the databases. You don't even have to give them your email address once: they'll get that from marketing databases and match it to your other profile info. I've managed to get control back in Gmail by aggressively creating filter rules to drop all email from campaigns. About once a week someone new sneaks through. Also in general the unsubscribe or stop-to-end options with each specific campaign do work, the problem is new campaigns keep putting you on new lists. Some of the fundraising platforms like EveryAction have product-wide opt-outs that help with that.
The advice above is for political donations. For non-profits it's usually not so bad, they generally respect your no contact wishes. You can also set up a Donor Advised Fund to offer yourself some anonymity but that's complicated and implies you're donating a large amount of money.
posted by Nelson at 6:53 AM on July 5 [2 favorites]
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posted by noloveforned at 9:55 AM on July 4 [4 favorites]