What should your charity's e-mail footers include?
Howard Lake | 29 May 1998 | News
It makes sense to add your name and charity’s contact details at the end of every e-mail you send out, but what details are legally required?
As with a paper letterhead, a company or business should include its address and contact details on every e-mail it sends out. Anonymous e-mails, or those that rely solely on the content of the “from” field are not going to have much of an impact.
But do you need to include any other information by law? According to solicitors Jonathan Berman, Halberstam Elias & Co, you do. Writing in “Internet Business” magazine, they say that e-mail does qualify as a company’s business communication. As such, it must include the company number, name and registered office “and other similar matters” as detailed in the Companies Act 1985 and the Business Names Act 1985. Charities should of course include their registered charity number too.
In terms of risk management, the solicitors also recommend including in an e-mail user policy “the need for confidentiality notices on e-mails sent to external bodies and clients.”
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Of course, such text can rapidly start to dominate the body of an e-mail message. It starts to read like the extensive small print that must accompany financial service advertisements, and as such could affect the impact of a fundraising appeal via e-mail. Some companies and charities have tried to shorten this legal content by simply adding Web links to the relevant policies and statements on their Web site. It is not clear whether these satisfy the legal requirements for business communications.
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About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.