Defenders of Wildlife wants your money. There are several ways to give your money to the Washington, D.C. based organization that is dedicated to “the protection of all native wild animals and plants in their natural communities.” Problem is, if you give them your money, they could become one of the major annoyances in your life.

At least, that’s my wife’s experience. Three years ago, she ordered several wildlife adoptions for us to give out as holiday gifts to clients. These adoptions included stuffed animals, certificates, pictures, and a variety of other items. In the part of the order that asked for instructions, she listed some specific requests. Defenders of Wildlife ignored them all and sent the order to us in a way that made it essentially unusable. But that was just the beginning.

Since then, Michele has been receiving emails from Defenders of Wildlife at a steady clip. She has used the “unsubscribe” link contained in each email at least 20 times to no avail. She has gone to the website in order to find an email address to send her unsubscribe request to somebody who would pay attention, but nobody has, despite the fact that the tone of each email is angrier than the last.

Today Michele would burn her money before giving a nickel to Defenders of Wildlife, and she’s happy to tell anybody who will listen. And since we can’t get off their mailing list, we’ve submitted the domain to our spam service.

No doubt Defenders of Wildlife does some good, noble work. But if you rely on donations to fund your nonprofit, and you put systems in place that are guaranteed to piss off the people who want to give you their money, you probably won’t be in business for long. At the very least you won’t be able to do as much good work as you’d like as frustrated benefactors take their limited donation dollars elsewhere.