My company is fundraising for the American Heart Association Heart Walk. I’d like to start a thread wherein I ask users to send me their email addresses via private message. I’d then enter these addresses on our fundraising website, and the volunteers would receive a solicitation to donate. All this would be explained up-front in the thread.
What’s in it for me? By collecting the email addresses, I can earn casual dress days at the office. This reward is based solely on the contacts - nobody has to make a donation unless they’d like to otherwise.
Perhaps not the noblest of causes, I’ll grant, but if everything’s spelled out and the addresses are handled via private messages, is this kosher?
Ended up doing some homework to answer that question! Here’s what I found.
The American Heart Association uses a third party, Kintera, to handle its online fundraising. They advertise themselves as “the leading provider of online solutions and services to nonprofits,” and Google shows me pages for other major charities such as Big Brothers / Big Sisters and the Lance Armstrong Foundation that use them.
Though Kintera (sometimes listed as Blackbaud, a competitor that purchased them in March) has pages that list their security policies, the only thing I can find regarding emails is from the participant FAQ: “Will Kintera put my name on various mailing lists? No.”
Google searches for “kintera abuse” mostly returned abuse prevention charities, and searches for “kintera sucks” returned pages where people who work for charities complain about their frustrations trying to use Kintera’s back-end interface. From what I can tell, they really do seem to be on the up and up.
The company I work for won’t have any access to the actual email addresses I collect. They can run reports on the Kintera website to see how many emails I’ve sent via my participant webpage, but not the addresses.
Assuming Kintera acts in good faith, pepple who give me their address will receive a solicitation email I wrote, inviting them to donate to the American Heart Association via my fundraiser webpage. That seems to be it.
We feel really uncomfortable with this – even though people would be giving their email addresses voluntarily, what happens with these email addresses afterwards is unknown and, to be honest with you, suspect.
People that might want to contribute to a one-time only event – which most of our charitable requests are, self-contained situations – we don’t want them to be continually harassed because they gave their email in good faith and it got sold. We can see so many opportunities for this information to be harvested and sold to third parties that we can’t in good faith recommend this to our users.
Nothing personal, sorry to mess up your casual days, but no.
On one hand I agree. Because a third party is involved, the potential for abuse is there. On the other hand, though, I’d rather see each individual board user come to that decision on their own rather than seeing the mods make that decision on their behalf. Some people have protections in place (e.g. spam-catching email addresses), others simply don’t care (e.g. me, who has a thirteen year old email and figures he’s already on every mailing list there is).
I do thank you all for giving this your time and consideration today. See you around!