What to Do About the Girl Scout Cookie Pitch
Tips on how to handle co-workers who pester you with fundraising requests.
Oct. 4, 2007 — -- In the average cubicle worker's day, there are a number of office etiquette minefields to be avoided. Perhaps none is more fraught with anxiety than the unsolicited solicitation.
Maybe it's a donation request for the IT guy's "fun run." Or the wrapping paper/almond bark/potted plant school fundraiser sign-up sheet brought in by a middle schooler's middle management Dad. And then there's the mother of all moneymakers — Girl Scout cookies. On any given day, you could run into requests for all of them before you even get to your desk.
"I used to dodge it," said Mona SooHoo Wong, a Waltham, Mass.-based mortgage consultant. "I would say, oh, I'll take a look at your wrapping paper catalogue and then conveniently miss the deadline."
Writer Penelope Trunk, on the other hand, took the direct approach. "I would get e-mails from women I knew who had investment banker husbands and live in huge loft apartments. And they would want me to donate to their charity fun run," said Trunk, the author of "The Brazen Careerist" and a frequent blogger on business issues. "I would tell them 'why don't you just write yourself a check?'"
"My problem is with putting out money for stuff I don't need and my wife saying why did you bring that awful design of wrapping paper home," said Nick Hart, a 40-something sales consultant in the San Francisco Bay Area." "I don't mind donating to my colleagues' children's walkathon for heart, lungs or any other organ of the body because I don't have to worry about stuff cluttering up my house. But I think it should be a soft sell. And I'm in sales."
Click Here For Tips on Sending Co-Workers E-mails
Often, though, it isn't a soft sell, said Ann Marie Ringie who works at a small consultancy company in New England. "I can think of one woman in particular who sends mass e-mails reminding everyone where the sign up sheet is. … I work at a very small company. You can't avoid these people. They know who does and who doesn't donate."
Ringie refused to bring her own school-aged son's fundraising products into her office. Still, she feels obligated to donate to her co-workers. "How can I not contribute?"
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