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Comment by avalys | Hacker News Reader

A nonprofit using tricks to get your attention as they ask for donations? Say it isn’t so!

In other news, NPR pledge drives are so annoying.

To be fair, this is one of the few non-profits that benefits most people and that is actually used day-to-day by the majority of people with an internet connection.

Two extremely bold claims.

Do you know how many people in the world have an internet connection?

But at least they're (mostly) honest? They take up some time, but they're clear about what's happening. The only "deceptive" practice they have is the two-for-one matching grants, which I'm dubious about whether they exist or not.

That sort of matching is real, but usually just a psychological trick to encourage people to donate more.

A foundation or rich person says "hey NPR we wanna give you $10 million" and NPR says "what if instead you match every donation we get dollar for dollar up to $10 million?". That way, they can encourage smaller donors while still getting the original $10 million.

The important difference is what happens if they receive less than $10m from other donors.

The donation matches are typically not grants, but rather _other donors_ playing those games (surely in collaboration with NPR's development dept). They definitely exist.

The deceptive part is when they tell you they need your money today "to defend Wikipedia's independence" when in actual reality they need money today so they can increase their annual budget by $42 million (that's the increase from 2020/21 to 2021/22).

Year goal 20/21: $108M https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AWikim...

Year goal 21/22: $150M https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Medium-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statisti...

> In other news, NPR pledge drives are so annoying.

I'll take an NPR pledge drive over the 1-800-KARS-for-KIDS commercial any day.

With NPR, does the aggressiveness match the need?

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