What is CAN-SPAM?

Anonymous Blackbaud User

The Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act (CAN-SPAM) was signed into law by President Bush on December 16, 2003. What does this new law mean to nonprofit organizations who are communicating via email?

The federal CAN-SPAM act, placing limits on commercial email, came into force on Jan 1 2004. Here are the key points clients using Convio Email should be aware of.

First, the good news - if you're managing your house file in a responsible and ethical manner, and using the Convio Email tools in a straightforward way, you're already largely compliant with CAN-SPAM. The law is targeted directly at the most egregious spammers; to be successful and ethical e-marketers, most organizations are already holding themselves to higher standards than this law requires.

There are a lot of specific technical provisions to prohibit obfuscation and forgery of email headers, many of which are already covered by the Convio software. A few specific points of note, all of which are common sense best practice;

Provide a valid "From" address which ultimately delivers to a real person at your organization who can respond in a timely manner, and preferably, has provision for vacation cover

Provide an accurate and descriptive subject line

Provide an effective, electronic means for people to unsubscribe (Convio automatically checks for a link to the unsusbcribe tool before sending)

Convio 3.8 also has a new feature which allows you to offer the user a "partial unsubcribe" from a single interest instead of unsubscribing from all emails. This approach is acceptable under the new law, but it places the onus on you to make sure that topic areas are well defined and that every email is correctly targeted and on topic, otherwise you risk emailing someone on a topic they unsusbcribed from, which is spamming. Consult your account manager if you intend to do this.

A specific provision in the law that has stimulated a lot of discussion and confusion is that any email which is (a) advertising a commercial service, and (b) not part of an ongoing relationship or transaction, must have a postal address for the organization on it. Many non-profit emails fall outside this requirement, but it's good idea anyway to add a postal address to the footer in all your outgoing e-mail if you don't already do so.

Copyright 2004 Convio, Inc.