Today, I received an action alert from you, through my membership of Care2. It’s great to hear your contributing to the fight against Japanese whaling, but I was somewhat taken back by your approach. You’re asking me to “Help Humane Society International lead the opposition on Japan’s Whale Hunt!”. Pardon?
Having worked at a desk next to the international anti-whaling campaign team of 2006-2007 of “another organisation”, your name wasn’t at the top of my list of anti-whaling campaigns. Frankly, it wasn’t at my list at all, and I’m sorry to say, I didn’t even know Humane Society International existed.
So I wanted to find out a bit more about your campaign. But…
- All the links in the email go to a donation page (fair enough, with that big “Donate Now” button, it was pretty clear what you wanted from me).
- Once on that donation page: still no clue about what your campaign was all about, and again: no links. Do you have a campaign?
- So I hovered over the “please send us an email” link at the bottom of the page to find a web addres: www.hsi.org
- The word “whale” doesn’t even appear on that page! And neither does the word “Japan”. It took me some fiddling around before I actually found something like a whale campaign page (with breaking news from 21 December?)
- There is also a campaign page for the US organisation (where did I see that photo before? and where’s the photo credit for that photo in your email, who took that one?)
I applaud your efforts and involvement in this issue, trying to end to this ongoing unnecessary cruelty. It’s great you had a victory at the Australian court. But asking me out of the blue for a $100 suggested donation in this manner is really putting me off. You’re exploiting cruel images made by other organisations to fundraise for yourself. That’s not how I envision an organisation to “lead the opposition”.