Thoughts on privacy policies for online donations

[dreamshark]

After spending what amounted to a full day making donations to worthy causes online, I have some ideas on what I would like to see in terms of privacy policies. Everything I mention below is something I saw at least once on some site, but I don't think I found a single one that implemented all of these things. If I find one that does, it's going to the very top of my repeat donation list!! Looking at it from the point of view of the donor (who is probably donating to more than one cause and doesn't want to end up drowning in charitable solicitations) these things seem pretty obvious. Apparently when looked at from the point of view of a single organization desperate to get donations, it's not so obvious. So I'm writing this as advice to the organization itself.

If You Are An Organization Hoping to Get Online Donations

1) The Charity Navigator website offers some specific guidelines for donors who are concerned about unwanted mail, spam, etc. ( How to Stop Solicitations by Mail.) A lot of people visit this site when researching charities, so start here to see what kind of privacy control donors are starting to look for. Note that the primary thing that Charity Navigator will rate you on is a clearly posted privacy policy, so start with that.

2) The tricky thing, of course, is what goes INTO the privacy policy. Privacy policies are often full of annoying gobbledy-gook and obvious statements with the one thing people want to know (who are you going to give my address to?) kind of obfuscated at the bottom. I'd say, keep it simple and tell the truth. If you feel that your organization simply cannot survive without selling or trading donor lists, be truthful and try to put the best spin on it.

3) Accept donations via Paypal! This makes donations much quicker and easier, provides the donor with online proof of donation for IRS purposes, and allows donor to keep their personal information private. Oh, and test your website to make sure the Paypal button actually works (and not just with Internet Explorer!).

4) Offer anonymous donation as an option. Many sites have a checkbox for this. If they also offer Paypal as a payment option, this is far more convincing since they don't have to ask for personal information to verify a credit card.

5) If your privacy policy explicitly promises that you won't share personal information with other organizations, place this statement prominently on the website in addition to burying it in the privacy policy. This is a huge selling point for many people and seeing this promise may seal the deal.

6) Offer a set of checkboxes allowing donors to specify how YOUR organization will contact them in the future. Most people just HATE getting monthly mailings, but they may be fine with a quarterly newsletter or yearly donor reminder. I suggest the following set of options:

• anonymous donor (organization keeps no contact info)


• newsletter (by email or snail mail) on request only - specify newsletter frequency


• gift reminders : choice of snailmail or email, specify frequency (allowing user to choose zero)


• no phone contact whatsoever (and don't require a phone number on donor form)


• if you must, ask for yes or no to "share my contact info with partners"

7) When prospective donors email you with questions about your privacy policy, have the answers ready and RESPOND IMMEDIATELY. Remember, if somebody sends you an email like that they are trying to make a decision on where to make a donation, and you are not the only fish in the sea. You might be surprised how few organizations actually respond to such queries and how much of a difference it makes. (I dropped two organizations that I had been planning to donate to and gave $1000 instead to the one that actually responded.)

Let me know what you think. Would these privacy features make a difference to you as a donor? How do they look from the point of view of an organization looking for donations?

Comments

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

In some sense, it doesn't matter much how they look to the organizations; if that's what the donors want, the donors can achieve most of them, as you demonstrated, with some work. I suspect that $1000 donations are rare enough to be paid some attention to.

I do think that avoiding spam (including paper junk mail) is an important issue to many donors. I know that my mother has complained a lot about the repeated "begging letters" she's getting from organizations she has a history of supporting.

From what I can tell (I have a commercial PayPal account myself, and worked on a web site for an organization that used conventional credit card processing), PayPal is a good deal for such organizations. No serious downside that I know of. They might want to *also* accept ordinary credit cards, because people less net-centric than us are less likely to have a PayPal account.

[vgqn.livejournal.com]

If you pay with a credit card via a PayPal account, is the credit card info given to the recipient or is it still invisible?

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

The credit card info doesn't go to the recipient when you pay via PayPal. I like this, as I can't be accused of mishandling their credit card information if I never received it.

[asimovberlioz.livejournal.com]

Invisible, though the receiving organization may be able to retrieve reports which will show partial CC numbers, sufficient for identification but not sufficient for getting ripping off.

[vgqn.livejournal.com]

Great ideas. Are you going to send a copy of this to all of the organizations who failed? Or even those who qualified but didn't meet all these standards? (And especially to the ones that came close but lost out.)

To be fair, some of those orgs might have been closed for the holidays as many places are, so that might be why you didn't get an e-mail response. Though they should think about that and the fact that people like you might be making end of the year inquiries, and arrange for some person or persons from their organization to monitor for such inquiries from home if not in the office.

[asimovberlioz.livejournal.com]

I have intimate, longtime, and current knowledge of an organization such as you describe. Perhaps I can write you privately and discuss some of these issues with you.

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

Sure, email me. And if you think my comments might be of interest to the organization in question, feel free to pass them on.

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

Every organization that solicits donations should see this. (And viva PayPal; I helped Centennial set up a PayPal donation button on their website, and it proved its worth today, with a lot of last-minute donations from congregation members.)

[serendipoz.livejournal.com]

I don't know if they'd make a difference to me or not, they all sound useful though.

At the moment I'm interested in looking for results of what I donate - Peg Kerr had a recent note about the microfinance site Kiva so that sounds useful to me. It has listings of grants and results and information about who gets the money.

To a degree it's all too easy to shift the cash without seeing where it goes and what it does.

I'd be very interested in knowing who you selected to give money to this year, though.

Thanks.

Joyce

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

"I'd be very interested in knowing who you selected to give money to this year, though."

See my last couple of posts.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

I wonder if any organization can be convinced to not add a donor to their database, even if the person requests zero contact. I imagine that they keep the names of donors in all circumstances. I don't know what HOBT does (and will find out), but I know that the mailing list is considered a primary asset of the organization.

I don't think we have ever sold our mailing list, but I am pretty sure that we don't have a policy on its use, either.

K.

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

A lot of well-meaning organizations promise not to sell their mailing list, but will "trade" it with other organizations, which amounts to the same thing. I realize that to the organization, this database is an asset and looks like $$$. But donors do not want 10 pieces of unwanted mail to show up in their mailbox for every dollar they donate, no matter who sends the mail.

I'm not sure exactly what "anonymous donor" really means. The 3 charities on my donation list that had a specific checkbox for "anonymous donor" are: Tubman Family Alliance, Minnesota Emergency Foodshelf Network, Feeding America (Second Harvest). Maybe you can figure out from their websites what information they actually keep. As long as they don't bug me or increase the number of other organizations bugging me, I don't much care.