BBYO management: incompetent or merely stupid?

Earlier this year, my wife and two of my daughters attended CELEBR-8 U, a conference for middle school and high school girls organized by Moving Traditions, a wonderful organization for which our family has a great deal of fondness and respect.

One of the co-sponsors of the conference was BBYO. Unbeknownst to us, Moving Traditions gave BBYO and other sponsors access to the attendee list, including email addresses. Shortly after the conference, BBYO started spamming my wife.

I have now asked BBYO five separate times to stop spamming my wife:

• On June 10, 2012, I emailed ner@bbyo.org and information@bbyo.org (which bounced, despite being an email address advertised by the organization) and also clicked the unsubscribe link in the spam. Marissa Feinman <mfeinman@bbyo.org> responded to my complaint but the spam continued.
• On September 14, I emailed abuse@constantcontact.com, mfeinman@bbyo.org, and Casey Topol <ctopol@bbyo.org>.
• On September 28, I emailed abuse@shreve.net, azabbgic@bbyo.org, and Sabrina Moore <smoore@bbyo.org>.
• On October 4, I reported BBYO’s spam via SpamCop and clicked the unsubscribe link in the spam.
• Today, October 18, I emailed abuse@cais.com, postmaster@i95.net, abuse@alliedtelecom.com, abuse@shreve.net, and ctopol@bbyo.org. It is worth noting that today’s spam had no unsubscribe instructions, which means it was sent in violation of the federal CAN-SPAM Act.

About 30 years ago, when I was suffering through the worst three years of my life and my social life was nonexistent, my parents had the brilliant idea that I should give BBYO a try. I attended one meeting and was so the-opposite-of-impressed that I never went back. I’m sorry to see that management of the organization does not seem to have improved much since then.

I hope Moving Traditions will think long and hard before co-sponsoring events with BBYO in the future, or at the very least, will refrain from giving BBYO access to the email addresses of event attendees. It really wasn’t OK for Moving Traditions to give out people’s email addresses without their knowledge and consent, but it’s all the more not OK because of what BBYO has done with them.

UPDATE [2012-10-19]: I spoke to someone from Moving Traditions this morning. They apologized for the situation and indicated that they are taking steps both internally and with BBYO to ensure that something like this does not happen again. Their response reflects well upon their organization, and I am grateful for it.