Fund Raisers Debate a Product That Monitors Donors’ Viewing Habits

A new tool designed to help charities increase bequests and other types of donations has sparked a controversy over the privacy rights of donors.

At issue is a product called Planned Gift Prospector. It is produced by Pursuant, a Dallas consulting company that advises charities on online fund-raising campaigns, and the Stelter Company, a Des Moines business that produces marketing and other materials for fund raisers.

The Planned Gift Prospector is a video presentation on a compact disc that charities can send to donors to view on their personal computers. Each presentation is individually tailored to promote the good works of a particular charity. It asks recipients to support the organization with a gift, and encourages them to fill out a form that is sent by e-mail to the charity.

Many fund raisers, however, say they are troubled by a key aspect of the product. When viewers look at the disc on a computer connected to the Internet, the product has the ability — without the donor’s knowledge — to monitor whether and how long each recipient watches the presentation and to provide other information that is automatically returned electronically to the charity. Several veteran fund raisers say that collecting information on unsuspecting donors while they use their personal computer to view a presentation they received as a gift is unethical; such a practice violates donors’ privacy and trust, they say.

“Inappropriate, invasive, insulting, and inexplicable,” wrote Roger Ellison, vice president for planned giving at the West Texas Rehabilitation Center Foundation, in San Antonio. Mr. Ellison posted his comments about the new product on an online discussion list for fund raisers who specialize in seeking bequests and other planned gifts — donations that offer special financial and tax benefits to donors.

He continued: “Here is the practical side of an ethical acid test regarding the new prospecting technology: Sit down with one of your favorite donors and explain the details of the technology in plain English. Carefully watch, read, and listen to your former donor’s reaction.”

“I consider it a privacy violation if there hasn’t been full disclosure and if they haven’t obtained my express permission to monitor my keystrokes,” wrote Jeff Steele, a former financial adviser to wealthy donors, on the same discussion list. “Am I the only one disgusted by this? Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you ought to.”

E-Mail Campaigns

Officials of Pursuant defend its product’s design.

“This technology already exists for e-mail campaigns, and has been used for years,” says Michael Ames, a business-development specialist at the company.

With e-mail campaigns, he adds, it’s common practice among charities to track who opens an e-mail message, as well as which people click on links in the messages, how much time they spend on the site those links connect them to, and which pages on the site they visit.

“All we have done is taken an e-mail and sent it out in the U.S. mail on a CD,” Mr. Ames says, adding that charities are often late adopters of new technology. He says he is hopeful they will become more accepting of the product, as they have with the tracking practices of e-mail campaigns.

Each CD costs a charity $15 to $25, depending on how much work it takes to produce it and how many are purchased. So far, four charities have purchased the product, according to Pursuant.

Mr. Ames says that the two companies consulted lawyers as the product was developed and that legal experts found the product to be in line with accepted solicitation practices.

Even so, some fund raisers said they were troubled by the product.

“When I go onto a charity’s Web site, they can see who is coming on and they can look at the pages I go to. I think that is okay,” says Kathryn Miree, a lawyer in Birmingham, Ala., who specializes in planned gifts. “It is a very different thing if someone sends me a CD I think I am reading in private, and they are tracking where I go.”

Still, Ms. Miree says, she is reluctant to completely reject the new product and others like it without more discussion among fund raisers. New products like the planned-giving CD might be a good reason for nonprofit groups to come up with ethics guidelines based on evolving technologies, she says.

Producing Results

Meanwhile, charities that have tried the product are not unhappy with the results.

The charity featured on the companies’ promotional video about the new product, the Presbyterian Healthcare Foundation, in Dallas, says that the product last year enabled it to persuade 10 families to put the organization in their wills, up from the three or four it recruited as donors in previous years.

The foundation sent 600 copies of the CD to potential donors, and learned that 8.5 percent of the recipients watched the video. Officials say that they are very pleased by the number of viewers, especially since mailed planned-gift appeals typically get a response from no more than 2 percent of the recipients, says Ben Casey, the foundation’s president.

“It helped us know whether they opened it,” he says. “It was helpful in building our donor base.”