Way back in 2006, I tallied my charity solicitations, and since then the situation has gotten comically worse. So over the past year, I’ve tried to keep all the solicitations I received from various charities, some of which I haven’t contributed to in years. This time, instead of a simple table, I’ve made a couple kitchen floor charts showing the actual pieces of mail received. I probably missed a few, and phone calls are not represented.

Here are my “charts” of charities sending the most and least amount of mail in 2014.

Care is easily the most annoying (I even found another piece after taking the pic). I didn’t even know I had donated to Care, but they handled a donation for typhoon relief.

It’s good to see that Public Citizen and Southern Poverty Law Center are doing better. They were the top offenders in 2006, but they’re now mostly honoring my request for one solicitation per year.

Perhaps the annoyingness is exacerbated by my giving pattern, which is to give toward the end of the year. Unfortunately for me, common practice is to accept the December gift and then send an “annual renewal” just a few weeks later in January.

The worst offenders have either been dropped or switched to reduced anonymous giving, but I expect the junk mail to continue for years. And anonymous giving is expensive as far as I can tell. Network for Good adds a 5% fee and JustGive adds 4.5%. Hopefully, that includes the credit card fees, but I’m not sure. It shouldn’t been so expensive just to move money. Fidelity Charitable with a flat fee of $100 per year may be another option, especially if the credit card fee is separate for the other options.

My truly least annoying charity (annoyance == 0) is one that sent me no mailings or online annoyances: the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences. Thanks to Neil Sloane and many volunteers for that excellent resource. Wikimedia was also in the no-mailings camp, but they made Wikipedia pretty annoying to use for most of December, so I’m not sure where to rank them.