Uncharitable

Over the last couple of months I’ve been doing quite a lot of work for a charity I’m involved in. Website and so on a while back, and now dealing with a lot of fund-raising issues and the like. Which is all quite fun, and in general I’m enjoying it.

In the last fortnight though, we’ve had a couple of bits that’ve turned into utter nightmares. Nothing complicated – we wanted some sticky labels printed to give to people when they’ve donated some money, that kind of thing, and also a couple of collection buckets.

Neither of these things is overly cheap, but the companies we’ve dealt with for them have been utterly useless. One doesn’t respond for a week at a time, and then seems amazed that we’d be slightly annoyed. In both cases we have to provide artwork for the relevant labels that are getting printed – I can understand this, up to a point, but when it comes to the company saying “we can’t accept this image, it needs to be the exact size for the label, and it needs to come through in a format for either Freehand MX or Quark”, you start to lose the plot a bit. Freehand MX isn’t that common anyway, and when the image has been sent in a standard Photoshop format, Freehand can import the file anyway. I know, because that’s how I did it in the end.

But in general we’ve been made to jump through every hoop for these companies, while all they really do is take the money and provide the goods. There’s been no assistance, they won’t resize the images or really do anything helpful at all. Most amazing of all, for a company dealing with mail-order requests, neither company has a credit-card facility at all. Nothing. And they can’t deal with an internet banking fund transfer to their account either. It’s pretty much cheque, cash, and that’s it. Which, in the middle of 2005 isn’t exactly the most helpful or competent way of handling things.

It’s been an incredibly frustrating process, and one I hope I don’t have to repeat too often. In the meantime, I’m going to be looking at sourcing other suppliers, so I won’t have to deal with these bloody cowboys again.