The EU General Data Protection Regulation, which took effect on May 2018, will require charities to request consent from contacts before they can make a fundraising request.
Fundraising requests will not include day to day admin or transactional mailing (such as Direct Debit information) but will include fundraising approaches, promotion of goods and services (including free events campaigning and promotion of a voluntary organisation's aims). Consent will need to be clear and involve a person not only ticking a tick box but will also require them to provide a means to be contacted.
GDPR effects mail, telephone, SMS and email, but will not have an impact on social media or door to door. As a result, Access Charity CRM has put in place the necessary changes in order for charities to be able to manage contact consent. The following areas in Access Charity CRM have been adapted as follows:
A new Communication Purposes form has been added to CRM Admin where you can create the areas that require consent and categorise them accordingly
Changes have been made to record the consent information against a contact. When you send a communication or mailing to a contact you will be prompted for the purpose as well as the mailing preference
A Purpose field has been added to all areas across the system where mailing or communication is required
Changes to consent are recorded to provide a history of how the contacts' wishes have evolved. This is displayed on the Purposes form, which is accessed from the Contact Preferences tab on the Contact form
New reports have been created in the Reports navigator to help audit data
The EU General Data Protection Regulation, which is due to take effect on 25th May 2018, will require charities to request consent from contacts before they can make a fundraising request.
Fundraising requests will not include day to day admin or transactional mailing (such as Direct Debit information) but will include fundraising approaches, promotion of goods and services (including free events campaigning and promotion of a voluntary organisation's aims). Consent will need to be clear and involve a person not only ticking a tick box but will also require them to provide a means to be contacted.
GDPR will affect mail, telephone, SMS and email, but will not have an impact on social media or door to door. As a result, Access Charity CRM has put in place the necessary changes in order for charities to be able to manage contact consent. The following areas in Access Charity CRM have been adapted as follows:
A new Communication Purposes form has been added to CRM Admin where you can create the areas that require consent and categorise them accordingly.
Changes have been made to record the consent information against a contact. When you send a communication or mailing to a contact you will be prompted for the purpose as well as the mailing preference.
A Purpose field has been added to all areas across the system where mailing or communication is required.
Changes to consent are recorded to provide a history of how the contacts' wishes have evolved. This is displayed on the Purposes form, which is accessed from the Contact Preferences tab on the Contact form.
New reports have been created in the Reports navigator to help audit data.
Before you can add consent against a contact, you will need to set up the communication purposes for the organisation on the Communication Purpose form. A purpose is an activity for which the organisation wishes to use personal information and these need to be clearly defined so that the contact has greater clarity when determining how their data should be used.
Examples of purposes include information about an event, receipt of newsletters, admin information or a fundraising request.
📌 Note: In relation to admin information, there is a distinction between admin communication, such as telephoning a contact to confirm their bank details who have previously agreed to set up Direct Debit payments, and admin communication that seeks to promote the aims of the charity. The former will not require consent from the contact, but consent for the latter will need to be requested.
Go to the Admin drop-down menu on the CRM ribbon tab and select Communication Purposes.
Click on the New ribbon button and enter the name of the Purpose and select the Category that it falls under from the drop-down menu.
Enter a Description for the purpose.
If you wish to link the purpose with a Mailing Preference then you can select this from the drop-down menu. This will default the mailing preference when the purpose is used.
The Required for Communication tick box will automatically be ticked to make sure that consent is granted by the contact before you send out any mailing. Leaving this box unticked will change the behaviour of the mailing blocks. In both cases, consent recorded against the contact will be observed. However, when the field is ticked, anyone that does not have consent would be blocked. When the field is not ticked a contact's consent would be observed, but anyone without consent will be included. This would be used for purposes that can depend on legitimate interest.
In the Expiry (Months) field you can enter the number of months the consent will be valid for. Once the expiry date is reached the status of the purpose will automatically set to 'Expired' preventing any communications or mailings from being sent. This is done through the background tasks and runs nightly.
Use the tick boxes in the Applicable To collapsible group to indicate whether the purpose applies to individual, organisation or household records.
Click on the Save ribbon button.
📌 Note: These tick boxes are only used to filter the available purpose when creating a new contact or adding consent to an existing contact.
No validation is applied as part of this option nor are the tick boxes applied when adding purposes by other methods such as: Importing data through Data Tools or the API, adding a purpose to a selection of contacts or when duplicating a contact's consent for a new purpose. The functionality was built in this way so that admin users can hide purposes that are no longer relevant or in use as consent requests change over time.
Details of how to add consent for a contact are outlined below. However, it is possible to add consent from an existing purpose and apply the same consent to a new purpose on the Contact Purposes form. This means that wherever a contact has given consent for Purpose A, this consent would also be given to Purpose B.
Make sure you have created the purpose that you want to apply consent to following the instructions above.
With the purpose record open, go to the More drop-down arrow on the ribbon and select Add to Contacts with Purpose.
Use the button to find and select the purpose to duplicate consent for.
Click OK.
The new purpose will be automatically added against the relevant contact records.