You make a donation to charity. A good cause, you think, and you want to do your bit to help. After all, as Tesco are forever reminding us, “every little helps.”

Innocently, you also provide your chosen charity with some personal details. Indeed, should you use your credit card, you may have no option. Where you live, how you heard about the appeal, perhaps your email address and your mobile phone number, all could be amongst the information you give.

Nor do you opt out when the charity asks if it can contact you again. All it wants to do, it promises, is to tell you how your money has been spent. How, conceivably, can you object to that? At the same time, almost as an aside, it hopes you won’t mind sometimes being sent some other “relevant” information you might find of interest.

As a result you subsequently get the occasional email or mailshot asking you to give still more. Fortunately, should you so decide, such missives are easy to ignore.

Simultaneously, unsolicited communications start arriving from other organisations, not all necessarily charitable. You may not make the connection, but your chosen charity is also selling your contact details on to any “carefully selected partners” able to afford the cost.

In certain other walks of life, selling people at a price is better known as pimping. Yet for some reason direct marketeers prefer the euphemism “list rental”. However, regardless of the description, by not opting out, you leave yourself open to exploitation.

The ways in which network operators can profit from your inertia are discussed elsewhere on this blog. Now, it seems, charities have similar ambitions.

According to a report on ThirdSector.co.uk, not-for-profit think tank nfpSynergy is about to step up its lobbying of mobile phone companies about their charges on charitable donations, research having revealed that nearly three-quarters of charities avoid using the medium because of the cost.

Despite more than three-quarters of charities collecting and storing mobile phone numbers, almost as many think mobile phone company charges on text donations are a barrier to their fundraising.

Because operators typically charge 50p to 60p, even on a donation as small as £1.50, such a “massive loss” to charities allegedly deters donors from giving.

"It appears corrupt that this amount of money is taken by mobile phone operators from a donation to not-for-profit organisations," npfSynergy suggests.

Joe Saxton, the co-founder of npfSynergy, is claimed to be in talks with operators about lowering their charges on charitable donations and suggests that, if they did, charities might well start using texting for such purposes as raising awareness of current campaigns.

Some might think that being interrupted by the arrival of a text message insisting that you immediately donate money for whatever purpose is anything but good news, no matter how worthy the cause.

The idea of being pestered by a succession of messages attempting to coerce you in to giving is even worse.

However, if Joe Saxton has his way, soon charity will no longer begin at home but instead commence with your handset. And such pleas may prove hard to ignore. Should you think it mean to opt-out your one hope is likely to be a continued lack of generosity on the part of your network operator.