Thank You, But I Want More

Toward the end of each month I look at how much money is left in our checking account and then decide how much my wife and I can afford to give to charity. I know giving to others should be first on my list of payments each month, but somehow my other creditors don’t see it that way.
Each day as the month progresses I cull through the mailings we receive from a half dozen legitimate charities and a few questionable ones, and I put a stack of candidates-for-giving on my desk. I could never satisfy all of the charities in the stack unless I distributed five dollars to each, but I rotate through the list as the months go by.
There are a number of worthwhile charities that spend far too much on their mailings. Each month they send me more than a few additional requests for help, and those requests come independent of whether I gave to them last month or not. I have several times been tempted to stop giving to those charities that fill my recycling bins, but then I realize the post office would surely go broke without them and I grit my teeth and add another inch of paper to the stack.
There is another practice of charities, however, that makes me want to scream, and that is the practice of sending thank-you letters for your contribution. The letter starts with how the charity could not do its wondrous works without generous, kind, deity-like people such as myself, and then the letter quickly transitions to an appeal for more bucks. Most tell you how much to give in order to keep your deity-like status.
Now I know how hard it is to run a charity, but first of all they need to stop wasting money by sending thank-you notes. The work they do is thank-you enough. Second, if they do want to keep saying thanks, then they need to stop asking for more money at the end of the letter. It really is an attempt to make you feel guilty that you did not give enough and they would like more. Thank you notes should be for gratitude, not for greed. And when you ask for more from someone that has just given you something, then I qualify that as greed.