Protecting Center for Reproductive Right's Privacy and Fundraising Mandate
Center for Reproductive Rights is a global legal advocacy organization that helps advance reproductive rights, such as abortion.
Beyond following privacy expectations based on legislative mandate, protecting audience privacy is of utmost concern to organizations like Center for Reproductive Rights, who need to ensure that their audience’s behaviors aren’t being tracked to build profiles for governmental interference or nefarious use by any other actors.
The team at the Center engaged Agility Lab Consulting to help align their stance and operational protocols to protect constituent privacy while also ensuring they could raise mission-critical funds and grow their impact.
Why does protecting
audience privacy matter?
The U.S. government regularly requests information – like email logs and social media activity – from private companies.
For example, the NSA uses Facebook and other social media profiles to create maps of behaviors of American citizens.
As practices like abortion are made illegal in some states, it’s especially critical that health organizations protect any record of their audience’s engagement with their mission and do not share sensitive data that can become publicly accessed.
Use Case
In this 2022 example, private messages between a mother and daughter discussing how to obtain abortion pills were given to police by Facebook, according to a Nebraska newspaper, and resulted in criminal charges.
Agility Lab's approach
We took the following approach to establish the Center’s stance on data privacy while also ensuring they were able to fundraise as productively as possible.
- Achieve cross-team understanding of multiple and varied mission KPIs
- Determine business and legal risk thresholds which then formed guiding principles
- Build and execute a roadmap to establish privacy norms and foundation
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Ensure ongoing growth of mission impact
Forming the Center's perspective
To achieve cross-org understanding of multiple and varied mission goals – which, first and foremost, led with protecting the Center’s audience and their data – we started by bringing together the fundraising, communications, and legal teams for collective conversation.
Agility Lab hosted a full-day workshop in which we framed the legal and business risks and opportunities available to the Center in various approaches.
With that shared perspective to guide us, we solidified decision making roles between the Center’s in-house counsel and its performance teams, continuing to come back to the team’s focus on data protection.
Following this cross-team collaboration, we reached consensus that the Center would engage in the collective agreements below.
Collective Agreements
Agreement 1: The Center collects explicit consent
The Center was already seeking explicit consent in bringing on new audience members to places like its email list, but this arrangement pre-existed current iterations of the Center’s teams.
- Through our discussions, legal and fundraising teams aligned on continuing with this approach, leaning on the benefits of ensuring its audience had all of the information helpful to making opt-in decisions and proactively future-proofing its file in the event that national U.S. legislation eventually mandates that level of explicit opt-in proof.
- Based on this agreement, we also worked to increase lead generation and cultivation opportunities so that we were driving more owned audiences to forms that included explicit consent designations so those records received a green-flag stamp.
Agreement 2: The Center does not exclusively rely on tracking cookies
Third-party cookies are a piece of code that allow marketers to track users across multiple domains, allowing them to understand the nuance of audience interests and target audiences on subsequent sites they visit. They are largely considered not consented and the industry is increasingly eliminating and/or moving away from using them based on this.
Given this, the roadmap we built for the Center included key components that allowed for tracking that was understood and consented by its audiences including:
- Onboarding a cookieless analytics tool that ensures on-site performance metrics can be understood by the team but does not rely on invasive tracking.
- Implementation of better source code tracking so that teams were able to better understand content consumption behaviors at an aggregate level that allowed them to optimize based on trends.
Agreement 3: The Center applies extra rigor to third-party review
With an understanding of cross-team KPIs and business and legal risk thresholds, we defined the Center’s approach to taking extra care to understand how their audiences provided their data to the Center and how that data was protected from that point on. This included applying extra rigor to understanding third-party use of audience data and sharing. We incorporated expanded approaches to:
- Screen current and potential vendor partners with data-use questionnaires and security and privacy validations
- Audit data collection processes and verify that fields being collected achieved only the mission use cases for which they were intended
Agreement 4: The Center proactively addresses future fundraising needs in privacy updates
One of the major objectives across both the legal and fundraising teams was to update the Center’s privacy policy so that it was both current with legislative mandate and made audiences aware of the fundraising and marketing initiates in which the Center engages.
Rather than simply updating the policy in a vacuum, we engaged in a collaborative approach in which the fundraising team shared updates on its future project desires with legal counsel and was able to make comments on legal counsel’s proposed amendments to the current policy so that it was both forward-looking and properly ensured the fundraising team could operate within its business risk tolerance zone.
These agreements ensured that fundraisers knew their audiences had actively provided consent to its outreach and that all teams are aligned on making future updates in a coordinated fashion.
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