How will you use my details if I donate?
What charities and nonprofits need to publish
They are anticipating a decade of appeal letters. The charity sector earned this suspicion, and an unanswered version of this question is a real reason people give anonymously or not at all.
How customers actually ask it
The same intent arrives in wording your page probably does not use. All of these mean the same thing:
- “How will you use my details if I donate?”
- “will you keep contacting me”
- “do you sell my data”
- “will I get post”
- “opt out of fundraising”
What a complete answer contains
For charities and nonprofits specifically, an answer is only complete when it covers all 5:
- 1
Whether contact details are shared or sold to anyone, stated as a plain yes or no
- 2
What contact they should expect by default, and how often
- 3
How to opt out, in one step, and whether opting out affects the donation
- 4
How long details are kept
- 5
Whether Gift Aid changes any of this, since claiming it requires keeping records
A worked example
Illustrative — not a real business
We never sell or swap your details, and we never share them with other charities. If you tick to hear from us you will get four newsletters a year and occasional appeals; if you do not tick, you will hear nothing beyond your receipt. You can opt out any time using the link on any email, and it does not affect your donation. If you claim Gift Aid, HMRC requires us to keep a record of your declaration for six years.
Which page should own it
Privacy or donation page
What silence costs
Donors give anonymously, or once and never again, and the charity never learns why.
More questions charities and nonprofits get
Related
industry
AI customer support for charities and nonprofits
Charities field questions from three different audiences — donors, volunteers and the people they exist to help — usually with no support team at all. All three sets of answers are somewhere on the website, and RubyRep answers from them at any hour, which matters most for the audience least able to wait.
term
What is AI customer service?
AI customer service means answering customer questions with a language model rather than a person. The useful implementations are grounded in a specific business's own content; the poor ones let a general model improvise, which produces confident answers that are wrong.
term
What is a knowledge base?
Traditionally a knowledge base is a help centre humans read. For AI support it is the source material a representative answers from — which means an ordinary website, well written, can serve as one without a separate help centre.
Does your site answer this already?
Point RubyRep at your website and ask it this exact question. If it cannot answer, neither can your customers.