X-Message-Number: 1867 Date: Tue, 2 Mar 93 10:24:18 -0800 From: (Thomas D. Shapard) Subject: CRYONICS ------- **** please do not pass to sci.cryonics *** ALCOR Donations Large national organizations that solicit donations have the advantage of a very large pool of possible donors to draw from. The same can even be said of local organizations, like your local PBS station that annoys you with those pledge weeks. ALCOR has no such advantage. We ALCOR members are essentially its pool of potential donors, and that makes for a very tiny pool compared to outfits like the Heart Association or any national social/political organization you can name. With that in mind I commend the following line of reasoning to my fellow members. I have been in the habit of dribbling out modest donations to assorted organizations during the year (many of who seem to use my donation mostly to print and send me more requests for donations ;-). By the end of the year this amounts to a few hundred dollars of donations. However on reflection, the success of none of these organizations means nearly as much to me and my future as does that of ALCOR. Further, nearly all of these organizations have that large donor pool advantage that ALCOR lacks. For those organizations I represent a vanishingly small fraction of a fraction of a percent of their potential donor pool. No so to ALCOR. To ALCOR I am one of the (sadly) precious few. From this I conclude the following for my self, and ask other members to consider the same for themselves. The bulk of whatever annual charitable giving I do should go to ALCOR. Whenever I see one of those many requests for donations from some other worthy organization, I remind myself that that organization has thousands of people who will donate to it, maybe hundreds of thousands. ALCOR does not, and it's up to me, and "we happy few" ALCOR members to make up for that fact. Tom Shapard ------- Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=1867