Give ‘til it hurts!

Here’s why your favourite charity won’t receive a donation from me this year…

I receive a lot of email from PR people on a daily basis.

Everyday, hundreds of press releases and announcements and who knows what else.

All of them clamouring for my attention. All of them unsolicited. I asked for not one of them.

But someone, somewhere, in the little cubicle of a company’s PR department decided that Justin Lloyd, because he writes for a bunch of magazines and on various websites, should be bombarded with every missive even remotely connected with music, computers, video games or any other subject that might stand a chance of getting picked up and mentioned.

And so when “that season” rolls around and I receive a number of solicitations to give charitably to either my or the PR person’s favourite charity, it gets utterly ignored.

In the season when you would think people would be in a giving mood, they tune you out even more so, because now you don’t want just their attention but their money too.

In an attention economy, if you spend your allocation unwisely, when you need attention, when it really, really matters, you’re ignored.

The next time you want someone to give, and in the process, give you attention and they ignore you, you might ask yourself if this is why.