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What I Love About Ricochet: No $exting
@blueyeti promised us in Ricochet’s recent Focus Group that “We also do not sell your email addresses or anything else to third parties even though we get asked about it on a regular basis.” As testimony to how good Yeti’s promise is, let me share what happened right after I subscribed to some other well-known right-wing outlet (which shall remain nameless) just this fall. I’ve been a Ricochet member for years. And for years, the partisan demands on my money have been negligible. Few emails, no texts. Life was good. Then, I signed up at that other right-wing outlet:
Now random politicians won’t stop $exting me. You know what I’m talking about. $exting. Those endless texts demanding money, burning up your phone faster than you can block them. Various personas claiming to be “Newt” or “Mitch” or “Scalise” take credit for sending them, though it’s hard to imagine the sender as anyone other than some pitiable peon of a staffer or intern, unhappily grinding out the wheedling that’s below everyone else’s pay grade.
Is it the end of the year? Then that’s as good an excuse as any to demand your money:
(SLF) URGENT: The LAST major fundraising deadline of the year is approaching & Mitch McConnell NEEDS your help TODAY. EXPRESS DONATE HERE:
Beginning of the year? Same dang thing:
(SLF) OFFICIAL: It’s 2020 & Mitch McConnel needs YOU to help him start the year strong! GIVE NOW to help Mitch fight radical Democrats:
You’ll get $ext after $ext reminding you each time that now is positively your last chance:
Jim Jordan, Newt, Stefanik & Scalise all asked. Your LAST AND FINAL CHANCE to defend Trump from impeachment with a 5X-MATCH ends in 3 HOURS
Spoiler: It wasn’t my last and final chance. It never is.
At some point, all this official urgency is bound to escalate into ransom demands:
(SLF ABC XYZ LBGTQWERTY) URGENTEST OFFICIAL EMERGENCY URGENT!!!: Real Americans DESPISE all WASHED UP, WEENIE DEMS like ANTHONY WEINER. NOW is your last chance to STOP FUTURE WEINERS IN THEIR TRACKS. DONATE TODAY or we will text you ALL Weiner’s HOTTEST D**K PICS. DON’T SAY YOU WEREN’T WARNED.
Fortunately, the $exts promising something in return are usually more enticing than that. More, ah, carrot than stick (ugh!). T-shirts. Mugs. Hats. Wrapping paper.
Yes, wrapping paper. To the $exters’ credit, the Trump wrapping paper offered to me dozens of times throughout the pre-Christmas season was pretty classy — I suppose as classy as any wrapping consisting of one name repeated over and over again can be. Its graphic design was well-balanced, the color selection, tasteful. I still don’t know what regular Americans would use the wrapping for, but just like Chinese characters look stylish enough for gweilos to use them as decoration without really knowing what they mean, someone who didn’t read Roman characters might find the wrapping paper equally pleasing.
That said, the offers of $exting $wag seem a bit unimaginative overall. How many hats, mugs, and shirts could one ordinary donor need? They should mix it up a little. Of all the $exts I got during the House impeachment vote, I’m a bit miffed I didn’t get this one:
URGENT ALERT: House DEMONRATS voted to impeach today. This is an OUTRAGEOUS outrage. Our databanks show you haven’t expressed your outrage in COLD HARD CA$H yet. But it’s not too late! Show you STAND WITH TRUMP with this CLASSY outrage tiki mask:
My parents were hardly slouches when it came to right-wing partisanship. Thanks to them, I got all my talk-radio-listening out of my system while I was still growing up. Still, they detested partisan demands for money as exploitative and crass. Who do these pols think voters are, they wondered, cash cows to be milked at every opportunity? The growling consignment of Republican fundraising demands to File 13 became a family ritual. Who am I to mess with family tradition?
So, dear Republican operatives, if you really want me to donate someday, would you please for the love of all that is holy stop $exting me? Every $ext curdles the milk of my partisan kindness just that little bit more. And thanks, Ricochet: I know the $exts aren’t your fault.
Published in General
I have learned this through brutal experience.
Never, ever give out your cell phone number. Never.
Was it Townhall.com? Because that happened to me with Townhall.com. Signed up years and years ago, and the daily list of emails is still growing.
Thing is… I don’t think I did give a phone number… just my email to sign up. Which makes all the $exts feel even more like creepy intrusions on my privacy.
The quality of political marketing by Republicans and conservative groups in general strikes me as very, very low.
I get dozens of paper-mail pieces with envelopes that say things like “CONFIDENTIAL”…”It is a Federal crime to interfere with this document”…”Serial Number 4325424325345.”
Perhaps every profession and industry bears the stamp of its formative years, and I suspect that a lot of direct-mail marketing people (including e-mail and text marketing) subconsciously think of their targets as naive and ignorant hicks:
“Lurlene! We got some mail from the big city…and it has a lot of BIG NUMBERS on it”…must be really important!”
Gee, I woulda thought all those urgent pleas for money would’ve made you feel loved and wanted.
I’ll stay mum on this.
I know other people who subscribed to the same outlet I did who haven’t got zonked nearly so hard, and though I can’t think of any reason other than my subscription for the $exts to start suddenly pouring in like they did, I don’t want to pretend this is that outlet’s normal subscriber experience if it isn’t. What’s important is my confidence that Ricochet doesn’t do this.
I never get $exts, only emails, and I know who did it. Fortunately, I maintain more than one email address to keep these people from annoying me.
Sure, I get them, too. Sometimes they make me laugh. I just hit the “delete” button and move on. It’s especially funny when they call me by my first name, and try to sound like my friend. I understand marketing, and this is marketing on steroids. Every once in a while, I donate a little bit, but never anything significant. It does warm the cockles of my heart to hear that the R’s are way out-raising the Rats.
Gee I thought for a moment you were talking sexting. On Ricochet that might be more than I could handle.
Hmm, it turns out that there are a lot of different Trump wrapping papers for sale. Curiously, no Trump rolling papers.
Missed opportunity, there.
One more example of how $exting could use more imaginative $wag, if it has to happen at all. An outrage tiki mask would have at least piqued my interest.
What are you wearing?
Hahaha, that’s how I read it at first, too. I can confirm we most definitely do not sext. But for the record, we do send out various reminder emails if your account is going to expire, and our payment processor sends out reminder emails having to do with renewals and expired credit cards, and things like that.
MAGA T-shirt, MAGA hat, and without an offer of any kind of branded pants (‘nother missed opportunity there) as $exting $wag, a kilt folded out of Trump wrapping paper.
Tres $exy, non?
Better yet. Don’t own a cell phone. I live in everlasting peace without one.
I am so happy to be a hick in the sticks.
I blame WinRED.com. If you give to any GOP candidate using this, you are gonna be spammed by *all* the GOP candidates.
My grandma would fall for this stuff.
Tinfoil of course,I’m on Ricochet.
That’s no shame. When I read about some of the scams people (and usually older people) fall for, it’s just astounding. And very sad.
Good to know. And why, even if I could score an outrage tiki mask as swag just this once, I’d be tempted not to, since politicians are worse than vampires: once you invite one in, the rest might invite themselves.
There have been a few that almost got me. I’ve had medical debt hit my credit in the past, and my life is still somewhat medically complicated, so especially if something looks enough like a medical debt collection or settlement…
So far, I haven’t been fooled. But it means all the tactics like what @davidfoster describes in comment #4 make me extra-angry when I spot them.
Both sides are brutal. I wrote about my own experience after the last election.
Nothing is worse than a successful strategy to raise cash because the technique is then copied by everybody and his brother. Mothership Strategies, the Progressive Trio from Hell, pioneered these kind of “churn and burn” operations. (If you’re on Twitter you can’t avoid their phony petition harvests where every other word is written in all caps. “Nancy Pelosi is on the VERGE of OVERTURNING Citizens United! All we NEED are 78 more SIGNATURES on our PETITION!”)
This crap makes public financing of campaigns attractive… right up until you realize how bad that would really be.
Then avoid the PIT at all costs. 😁
I blame this on Richard Viguerie. :) I see he’s still above ground and kicking at 86, with his own website, Conservative HQ (no link because I’ve never read it).
A feature not a bug.
I wish they would understand that those messages have a negative rate of return with me. I am much less likely to give the party money now because of the unsolicited invasive insincere spamming.
IM me your email address and I’ll send you a request for $$ myself. No need to sign up to other websites, we can cover all your importuning needs here in house.
I don’t think any of mine have come from conservative sites. If you give money to one Republican (or Democrat) that’s when it starts. And they have your e-mail and phone number because when you charge the donation to your card, you have to serve up that info.
I always text back STOP when I get the texts. And my spam filter is pretty good, about 50-60% of the e-mails go to the junk folder. And I don’t answer calls from numbers I don’t recognize (although these days most of those are from health insurance marketers, not politicians.)
If you check the actual e-mail addresses: if they are from McConnell or some other senator, it’s from the NRSC; from a congressman it’s from the NRCC, etc. For all I know, some of the candidates sell their donor’s addresses to other candidates. But they ALL share with their respective committees.
But I don’t want to write a check, so…….
True to form, I was wearing my blue “Proud to be HUMAN SCUM! NeverTrump 2020” tee shirt today.