Is Your Charity Selling Your Name?
Charity Navigator
December 1, 2004
Since launching our free charity evaluation service in the spring of 2002, we've had our sights on expanding our financial ratings to include assessments of additional performance measures. Taking the cue from our users, donors across America, who repeatedly tell us that they are fed up with charities selling their personal information to other charities, we recently launched an initiative to review each charity's commitment to donor privacy. Our primary goal was to enable donors to quickly determine which charities will keep their personal information confidential. And, as an unbiased third party, we believed that our initiative would also allow charities who respect their low-level donors to demonstrate their commitment to those donors.
Before discussing our approach and results, it is helpful to take a step back and explain how donors wind up with charitable appeals cramming their mailboxes. The fact that your mailbox is overflowing with address labels can be traced back to your own well-intentioned generosity. Many donors, when confronted with so many aggressive non-profit causes, feel compelled to try to help as many as feasible by spreading their charitable dollars among a variety of charities. For most of us, this means that each receives a small gift. Charities decide that cultivating this type of donor into one who is willing to make a more substantial gift, the type that can make a real difference to the charity's mission, is both time-consuming and costly and usually simply choose to sell the donor's personal information to other charities that do similar work, usually through a list broker. So a donor that gives $25 to one animal-related organization will usually never hear from that organization again, but will receive solicitation letters from tons of other animal charities. At Charity Navigator, we've previously pointed out that a donor's first line of defense against such practices is to concentrate one's giving. That being said, we believe those donors that have little to give, or simply prefer to support many charities, shouldn't be penalized or harassed.
When we started this endeavor, to examine donor confidentiality policies, we assumed that a significant number of charities had a fairly stringent policy in place. So, we asked approximately 3,300 charities to respond to the following question:
Does your charity have a written policy, prominently displayed on your website or in your solicitation materials, that explicitly states that you will not sell or trade a donor's personal information to any other entity in existence without their written permission?
Our initial request that charities voluntarily answer our one-question survey generated a mere 10% response rate. In an effort to be charitable to all involved, we tried again one month later by sending a second request to those charities that had yet to answer our survey. Only an additional 15% of the charities responded. We were surprised and dismayed that so many charities had such little confidence in their stance on donor privacy that they were unwilling to let us evaluate their policy.
Equally surprising was the number of times that charities told us that their privacy policy was an implicit agreement with contributors. Many claimed to have long traditions of refusing to share their donors' contact information, but they never thought to put it in writing, let alone inform their constituents that they had such a policy. Obviously, in those cases Charity Navigator was unable to confirm that the charity has a donor privacy policy. We encouraged these charities to take the time to put their plans in writing and to publish them on their website.
Finally, we were disappointed to learn that so many of America's largest charities had opt-out policies instead of opt-in policies. This puts the burden of responsibility back onto the donor. Opt-out policies require that the donor take action to avoid having personal information shared with other entities. Given the fact that so few charities had opt-in policies, we had no choice but to accept these as sufficient. That is with one caveat. As our analysts reviewed these policies, there had to be a prominent and user-friendly way in which donors could opt-out.
At the end of the survey, of the 3,282 of America's largest charities and non-profits that we questioned,
- 18% have donor privacy policies that Charity Navigator's analysts were able to verify (depicted on their ratings page as a latched padlock),
- 7% told us that they either didn't have a policy or they hadn't taken the time to put their policy in writing (depicted on their ratings page as an unlatched padlock), and
- 75% choose not to respond to our inquiry (identified on their ratings page with the term 'no response').
To the critics who say we shouldn't base our financial evaluations on the Form 990 - the only document that charities are required by law to share with anyone who makes a request in person or in writing - we would say take a look at the whopping 75% of charities who couldn't be bothered to answer our one-question survey. We simply couldn't offer the number of evaluations that we do, evaluations that donors across America depend on, if we based those evaluations on data that charities voluntarily submitted to us for review.
While it may be perfectly legal for charities to rent or sell your personal information to other organizations, Charity Navigator maintains that failure to provide donors with a quick and easy way of avoiding such practices is simply a failure to respect the rights of donors. Charities that engage in such practices do a disservice to the entire sector as they cause many donors to stop contributing to charities all together. In fact, we founded Charity Navigator to help restore the loss in confidence many donors have in our philanthropic sector as a result of the misconduct of a few poorly managed charities. We hope that by adding this new assessment, we'll encourage charities to adopt a donor privacy policy similar to the one that we remain committed to:
As a matter of organizational practice, Charity Navigator will not sell or share your name or personal information with any other entity.
- See the list of charities with confirmed donor privacy policies.
- Use our advanced search feature to limit your search results to those charities with confirmed donor privacy policies.
