What to Do About the Girl Scout Cookie Pitch

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?"

The subject is so fraught with potential workplace repercussions that many people contacted did not want their company names disclosed.

Unsolicited soliciting at the office can be big business, according to the Association of Fund-Raising Distributors and Suppliers. Overall, product fundraising is a $4 billion-dollar industry. And that doesn't count the charity runs and cookie drives. So if your inbox seems packed with solicitations it may not be just your imagination.

And management frequently gets into the act too — think United Way.

"Corporations today are under increasing pressure to be good corporate citizens and that's a good thing. But pushing their own moral and financial obligations on their employees in a way that could be perceived as being coercive, is not," said Catherine Reuben, a labor and employment lawyer at Robinson and Cole in Boston.

So are there any rules for giving at the office?

Although the average worker rarely thinks of it, it's best to check out your company's solicitation policy, said Jodi R. Smith of Mannersmith Etiquette Consulting. "Just because you can't recite your company's e-mail and solicitation policy doesn't mean one doesn't exit."

Many etiquette experts admit, however, that company policies for solicitation are rarely enforced. So the onus is put back on the employee.

One way of handling it is to decide at the beginning of the year which charities to support and by how much. But then comes the hard part — sticking to it. "You've got to have some backbone. Otherwise, you're going to be a patsy," said Peter Post, of the Vermont-based Emily Post Institute and co-author of "The Etiquette Advantage in Business."

Post also recommends that if you're the one soliciting donations, consider posting a notice on a bulletin board. Be sure to include your name and extension and ask that people contact you. That's a better route than a mass office e-mail, which can seem too intrusive.

And all workers should remember that what goes around comes around. So if you send out a fundraising e-mail to your entire corporate address book, be prepared for all of those people to hit you up for donations as well.

But just when you thought it was safe to go back into your inbox. Beware. Office etiquette experts suggest there's another e-mail issue lurking there — the "exit" e-mail.

Nick Hart worked at Nortel around the time the "bubble burst" in the computer industry in California. "It was a blood bath," Hart said. "There were times when I received multiple messages a day."

The standard exit e-mail usually begins "Dear Colleague." At some point it may refer to "new challenges" and "roads that lie ahead" and usually winds up with a line about "pleasure to know you" and "miss you all."

Some exit e-mails, however, take the low road and often end up being passed around from colleague to colleague and then posted on the Internet. Like this e-mail, reportedly from a San Diego-based law associate who wrote "I hope smoke from any bridges I burn today [may] be seen far and wide."

Other employees obviously spend a lot of time working on their exit e-mails. Hart said that lately he's been "very impressed" with the goodbye memos he's read. "They have eloquence and a measure of grace. I really like them."

Penelope Trunk, the Gen X/Gen Y business guru, believes exit e-mails are becoming more common because younger workers tend to move jobs every few years and they're savvy about networking.

"The younger generations are great at writing these e-mails because they have terrific online social skills. Where you might get into trouble is with older workers, who don't."

Trouble — like trashing colleagues or your company. Lawyer Catherine Reuben reminds employees that "they have a duty and loyalty to their employer while they're working for them and that includes the exit e-mail. You should be respectful and cordial."