I recently spoke with a major donor to a hospice. He had stopped giving to their work after nearly a decade of support. The reason? He was fed up of repeating the story of why he supported them.

There had been a high turnover of staff and every new fundraiser asked him to repeat why he gave.

He found it emotionally exhausting explaining about his loss and grief over and over again. He was also frustrated at the lack of organisational memory and thought it was a sign they didn’t care.

The hospice were mortified when I shared this feedback.

It wasn’t done deliberately, but rather because of a set of draconian and paternalistic data rules that forbade fundraisers to capture personal information like this on their CRM or in notes.

I see this time and time again.

Health charities afraid to ask whether someone has a specific condition.

Animal charities afraid to capture information on a supporter’s pet.

Campaigning organisations afraid to tailor language based on a supporter’s expressed preferences.

All this stops us delivering richer, personalised and engaging experiences and content.

GDPR: the fundraiser’s curse

Charities continue to interpret and apply GDPR in much stricter ways than almost any other sector.

To be clear, there is nothing in GDPR that means you can’t capture stories, personal data and feedback from supporters – as long as you can justify it and make it clear in your data policy how you’ll use that data.

I’m not talking about using ‘sensitive’ special category data (but even that hurdle is surmountable with care and consideration), but information that supporters expect you to know about them – their reasons for giving, their personal stories, their motivations.

This fear of GDPR and privacy rules damages relationships and makes fundraiser’s lives much harder.

There is so much research that shows that people are happy to share information and expect you to use it, as long as you explain why or offer something of value in exchange.

Just think about what Facebook, Google and other online platforms know about us.

Think about loyalty card data that means supermarkets often know someone is pregnant before they know themselves.

Think about the good we could unleash if we used this data in ethical ways to improve our world?

We mustn’t be scared of capturing the data we need to deliver great fundraising. The tools we have at our disposal are more powerful than ever before. But, they’ll only ever be as good as the data we feed them.

To deliver relationship fundraising and connect with donors in meaningful ways, then we need to get over our unease about capturing and using the data that will lead to more powerful interactions.