Messages from the Red Cross

Two years ago one of my co-workers pointed out the joy of donating money, after which I investigated my options. I was already donating to an Alzheimer group in the Netherlands, and also like PACE Universal, as they are doing projects in India (and in Kolkata, even). He pointed out that the Red Cross is quite good in finding worthy humanitarian causes, and has very low overhead. He also told me I should use a proxy for my donations, to avoid getting overwhelmed by spam. I listened to most of what he said, but unfortunately not the last part.

 It's not that the American Red Cross sends that many messages. In fact, after I set my settings correctly, they never contacted me for anything else than a donation receipt. It is that they share your address with their local chapter, which then proceeds to send letters and Emails, sometimes twice a day. Contacting them about it only leads to the address you used to contact them being used for additional communications.

I therefore decided to go to the Red Cross website, to see if there is a way to prevent this. After considerable navigation I figured out their phone number might be the only way to prevent this. I called the number and navigated their phone tree, which in the end put me (wrongly) in a meeting with several executives discussing trivialities, which made me wonder how they keep such a low overhead. They ignored what I said, and I found no other way yet. My last resort is the message on twitter, that I just sent out.