Communicating to Minors

Desiree White · August 2016

We have been operating under the rule that a minor under the age of 18 is removed from all emails and mailings. Is there an official rule that states that minors should be exempt from communication?

Joy park · August 2016

It depends on the laws in your country; then the laws in your state.

In Canada, as I understand the law, one is not supposed to track online information on anyone younger than 13 for commercial purposes.

We have many donors and volunteers that are under 18 BUT they are under the supervision of their parents while volunteering and so everything is done with parental permission/waivers. I make a specific note of the child's birthday, create the Relationship records for their parent/guardian/s, and mark the child's record with Do Not Solicit codes so that they are naturally excluded from anything "ASK" -wise when we pull a query (and filter out the DNS codes). We still send them a birthday message or other stewardship that doesn't include solicitations.

Parental Guardian Unit will receive solicitations for "the household" unless they also reach out to us to "Do Not Solicit".

However, if a child/teenager visits our website and signs up for our newsletter or uses their parent's credit card to make a donation, the system is not going to know that! If you insist that they provide their birthdate to determine that they are under/over 18, that might worry parents if they feel you could be collecting this personal information for your org's benefit (and you are, but it's benign). I don't know.... even Google asks for your birthday to filter "inappropriate" content these days....

This probably wasn't even an issue prior to the internet. But with the advent of "not being able to survive without one's mobile device in hand".... ;)

Brian Mucha · August 2016

I don't think that CAN-SPAM here in the US mentions minors at all. It's permissive compared to Canada. Its pretty much 'clearly state who you are, and offer an obvious unsubscribe link,'

I got curious and did a quick Google, and saw a few states working on spam protection statutes for minors about 10 years back. I think that would have been giant news though, on par wtih states starting up sales tax on internet goods. I bet the majority of broadcast emailers don't have DOB info at all.

But even if it isn't prohibited, you could certainly block them from solicitations because they will be unlikely donors. Our list also has a ton of minors using parent's email (from Teamraisers) so that would just means mom gets multiple copies of each ask. (But I haven't thought of this before and I don't think we don't block them ourselves at the moment.)

EDIT: Hey, we do block minors from solicitations. Nice job Phil!

Communicating to Minors

Comments

Categories