Your not ''Cynical'' your thoughts are reasonable and justified, I have a number of friends who have worked in the Telemarketing field and a number of those jobs have been in call centres for ;;collection; agencies for charities i won't name here. one position one close friend had was paying him $22.40 per hour PLUS commission, he was earning very good money and he was only one in a team of 30 callers, so how much of the donations ended up going to the charity ??? I have not given to ANY organised charity collector at all for the last 8 years, I will only make cash donations to organisations such as CFA, SES, Lost dogs home, etc and only by cash Direct to the organisation, then i know they get All of my donation.

we all should help out when we can, with what we can afford. BUT make sure you know where your money is really going ???

Several years ago my wife and I enjoyed watching Carols by Candlelight on television. Proceeds raised for Vision Australia were on the screen during the broadcast and we felt good and individually participated by donating a healthy amount to help the vision impaired.

Several months later and regularly since then we both have been receiving junk mail from Vision Australia asking for further donations. On one occasion I rang Vision Australia and asked to speak with their marketing person about their fund raising. The person concerned was busy at the time but I was assured that someone would return my phone call. We didnt receive the telephone call and have continued to receive requests for contributions.

Last week, I walked into their local office and explained the situation and their representative said that he would send them an email requesting that our names be removed from their lists.

Is it not a waste of time and expense to continually bombard their donators with unwanted mails in the hopes of getting more money? This has left us with a very bad feeling and we would neither donate to Vision Australia again nor recommend this particular charity even though we know they are trying to help the vision impaired. They appear to be wasting the money given to them as well as annoy people like ourselves who tried to help them. Thumbs down to Vision Australia!