And another misuse of our e-mail address…
Today’s addition to the woeful list of charities and charity suppliers that share e-mail addresses without permission is smstextgiving.com, the not-for-profit company that helps charities receive donations from supporters’ mobile phones.
UK Fundraising has just received a news release from smstextgiving.com which publicly lists our e-mail address together with 46 other e-mail addresses, names and organisation names. Every recipient of the e-mail therefore sees this list.
We certainly did not give permission to broadcast our e-mail address and details, so we assume none of the other recipients did.
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This mistake crops up with annoying regularity. For some, it’s a simple error. To us, it’s a misuse of our personal information without permission, a very important legal issue.
As we have advised before, if you don’t know the difference between the Cc and Bc fields in your e-mail package, find out today. We’ve banged on about it on UK Fundraising for long enough, Howard Lake mentions it in his training courses, and other sector legal experts mention it in their courses, including Bates Wells and Braithwaite.
As electronic communications become more and more important, publicising and sharing recipients’ e-mail addresses and names is just not acceptable.