Dear Arbor Day Foundation,
Let me start off by saying that I am a fan. I’ve even been a vocal supporter of your organization for years. As a professional garden communicator it goes without saying that I support the planting and growing of trees and given your extensive history of doing such good things, how could I not be supportive? That said, we need to talk.
In mid-February of this year I signed up through your website for a 6 month membership. As a perk of new membership I was offered 10 flowering trees and assured that they would be sent in time for planting in my growing zone. Several weeks would pass without word, so I emailed the address provided in the email confirming my order, [email protected], not once but a total of 4 times since the beginning of April 2011. Never once have I received a response from this address.
Given that summer is here and I never received the promised 10 flowering trees or the courtesy of a response to my repeated emails, I called the customer service number provided on the website. The representative I connected with was unable to pull up the details of my order and after a short explanation of my situation she asked to forward my case to a supervisor for follow up.
This morning I received a voicemail from “Ed”, explaining that my order never transferred from the web to the fulfillment process. He further said that I would need to prove that I paid for the order or place a new one.
At this point four months have passed since I placed that initial order, provided my personal payment information through the website and received my confirmation number, 9262553-534363. After being promised that I would receive trees in time for planting season I now realize that I should have asked for clarification as to exactly which season and in which year.
Please understand that I fully support the work of the Arbor Day Foundation and I am not seeking some sort of handout. I seek only to draw attention to a glaring problem with your fundraising system that can not only leave you open to potential fraud, it can lead to a great deal of bad impressions on the part of people who may not understand the depth and extent of your work.
I realize that I will not receive the trees that I was promised and that’s fine. I just need for you to realize that I will not be able to support the Arbor Day Foundation’s fundraising efforts any longer when my own efforts to support them were met with sloppy follow up, inadequate customer service and questionable record keeping.
I telephoned customer service again after receiving Ed’s voicemail and midway through explaining my case, I was disconnected. After the extensive frustration over this situation, I won’t be calling back. The trees are not why I signed up in the first place, but I would have appreciated the courtesy of knowing that they weren’t going to be here so I would not have held space on my homestead property for them through the entire spring planting season.
UPDATE 6/21/2011: This afternoon I received a telephone call from Luke who is the supervisor over the customer service department who had come across this blog post. We spoke for several minutes and I now feel that my concerns have been heard and will be addressed appropriately by the organization.
DISCLOSURE: I was offered and accepted a year membership to the Arbor Day Foundation during the conversation with Luke.
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Sadly, I have heard this from so many people that I have held off on joining and/or supporting the foundation. I teach gardening classes and I include their web address in my literature, but I always warn my students: “Let the buyer beware – even if it is only $10.” What do you want to bet they outsource the customer service process?
The saddest part of the matter to me is that when I did receive a follow up call from supervisor “Ed”, he dismissed the matter as “just a mistake” telling me that if I could prove that I paid for it, to call customer service and talk to the next available rep.
We had delivery problems too. We got our trees after there was a foot of seasonally-appropriate snow on the ground. We tried following the instructions for if you cannot plant them right away, but they were all dead by spring.
The Arbor Day Foundation does outsource their customer service to a student loan collection company with questionable practices called Nelnet. Google them. The Arbor Day Foundation just keeps cutting programs and firing all of the low-rungs on the ladder including their only certified arborist and a woman who worked there for 24 years who was less than a year away from retirement. It’s a top-heavy organization in need of a topple. All of the tree-plantings they tout are actually done by the U.S. Forest Service. They just filter money off the top and then give a portion to the Forest Service to actually plant the trees.