One Nonprofit’s Navigation Through Privacy Issues

Having a donor privacy policy on your site is a must for nonprofit organizations collecting donor information online. But having a privacy policy doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve got the whole privacy issue taken care of.

The Cleveland Museum of Natural History has a donor privacy policy and bill of rights posted on its Web site. But Bill Lynerd, chief development officer of the museum, says one thing that’s recently come up for the institution is the question of whether or not it’s a privacy issue to post its annual report — along with the names of donors who contribute $15,00 or more a year — on its Web site.

“I’ve just been having an e-mail exchange with one of our members of our development committee about the issue of having donors at a certain level listed on the Web site. We do it largely for donor-recognition purposes and cultivation, but it brings up an interesting dilemma and that is, ‘Do people increasingly want their names out there?’” Lynerd says.

The annual report is available on the organization’s site in PDF form and lists the names of donors categorized under donation ranges, e.g., $25,000-$49,999. The concern voiced by the committee member is that having these names on the Web might not only be troublesome for donors but also that it gives the public — namely other organizations — easy access to the museum’s donor list.

“[The committee member is] concerned that people might get approached by multiple organizations if they saw that they were contributing at a certain level to our museum, that that in fact might inspire others to pursue them,” Lynerd says.

The rationale for putting this information on the Web is twofold. First, Lynerd says it makes the museum more accessible to people interested in donating, as well as to existing donors. Second, it conserves paper and saves the organization money.

“As an organization we are concerned about conservation and sustainability, and by putting it on the Web, we determined that we saved something like 60,000 pages of paper last year, just in that one piece alone because it is a 28-page annual report,” he says. “It’s very important because we preach this message of conservation and sustainability and yet we were producing this document which, while beautiful, in many cases ended up in somebody’s trash or, at the very best, the recycling bin.”

The museum went from printing more than 12,000 copies of the annual report— which it would send to members and donors — to now printing fewer than 2,500, which it now just sends to donors.

Still, the potential privacy concerns of putting the annual report, rife with donor names, on the Web is an issue the museum is discussing. While Lynerd says the information in the annual report on the Web is also in the print version and on the museum’s donor wall, he admits that putting it on the Web makes it much more accessible to anyone.

But, aside from the question posed by the committee member, the museum has not received any complaints from donors regarding the online annual report, and Lynerd doesn’t see it as a betrayal of trust. One thing that perhaps helped the museum in that regard was its forthrightness in notifying donors in advance that the annual report would be available online.

“When we sent it to the donors this past year, when we put it on the Web for the first time and we didn’t send it to absolutely everyone under the sun, we said to them, ‘We are sending you this hard copy, however, you should know that in attempting to spend your contributions much more wisely, we are sending this only to our contributors and a few others and we are now making this available on the Web for the larger world,’” he says.

It reinforces the necessity of Lynerd’s No. 1 tip to other organizations regarding privacy issues, and that is communication with donors and constituents.

Bill Lynerd can be reached via www.cmnh.org