"Sir, Would You Like to Donate?"

Last year I read about articles pertaining to people raising funds through their websites for an assortment of causes ranging from purchasing milk powder for young children at home [from a single parent], to a birthday request for a laptop, to getting a post graduate degree. The results were rather encouraging with friends and strangers filling the honey pots. As critics try to analyze the ‘success’ of such methods of soliciting funds, one of the explanations seemed to stick around in my mind longer than the other ones given: that people donated because they could see how their cash made a real positive difference to someone’s life, something which they could hardly feel when they donated to a charity organizations.

Sounded somewhat crappy, I thought.

Two days ago my bank account almost bled to a premature death due to unforeseen circumstances. Suddenly a thought struck me to experiment a variation of this method, to pool finances for my inline skating lessons. I was also curious to see if this worked in Singapore as well as it did in the States.

Step one: I sent out a short and simple sms depicting my situation to two close girlfriends:

“Due to unexpected liabilities my skating fund’s in need of capital injection. No obligation but any donation is GREATLY appreciated. Target sum SGD360.”

Response rate: 50%.

Then I was chided by Daddy for making doing this, especially since it was almost a direct violation of my principles of staying debt free and/or no borrowing cash from friends. I terminated this unorthodox approach of securing funds for my lessons.

As always the precipitous abortion of my little experiment just induces persistent thoughts of what-could-have-been. So for the sake of satisfying the meow in me, how open are you to the contribution of such self-interest motivated funds?