A political donation programme must put its policy in front of donors
The requirementstatement
A political organisation soliciting donations by text must communicate its privacy policy to donors and enforce it.
- Severityseverity
- HighHIGHRejected by at least one carrier or provider, and a common cause of failure at the rest.
- When it bitesphase
- Gates approvalapprovalGet this wrong and the brand or campaign is refused at registration.
- What is checkedobject
- privacy policy body + donor-facing disclosure
- Where it liveslayer
- Policy pagesPOLICY_PAGE
- How Ekas settles itdetectability
- AI · crawlCRAWL
- Needs your live site or policy page fetched and read. Ekas crawls it the way a reviewer would.
- What the fix involvesfailureClass
- Fix the policyTERMINAL_POLICY
- The fix lives in your privacy policy or SMS terms. Ekas can generate the missing clauses.
- Who requires itauthorities
- CTIA
- When it appliesapplicabilityText
- Applies when the use case is POLITICAL.
Why this rule existsrationale
CTIA's political guidelines ask for more than a published document: the donor giving money over a text message has to be shown the policy at the point of giving, because that is the moment their number, their name and their giving history are collected together. Political programmes are run at speed by volunteers and consultants, so the policy is usually a link in a footer nobody following a donation link ever sees.
How to fix itremediation
Link the policy on the donation page itself and in the messages that ask for money, and hold the programme to it — including the third-party sharing ban that POL-078 applies. Done when a donor can reach the policy from the page they give on.
Common mistakespitfalls
- A link in the site footer is not communication to a donor arriving from a text on a donation URL. Put it on the donation page.
Notesnotes
Conditional on donations being solicited as well as on the political use case. The use-case half is tagged; the donation half sits in the criteria, which pass immediately for a political programme that asks for nothing.
Rules you will hit next
Other policy pages rules at the same severity. A registration is judged as a whole, not rule by rule.
POL-021Policy URLs must not redirectHighHIGHPOL-023A social profile is not a policy pageHighHIGHPOL-025Exactly one privacy policy must be discoverableHighHIGHPOL-026The policy on the site and the policy attached to the registration must agreeHighHIGHPOL-030Both documents must be linked from the site footer on every pageHighHIGHPOL-053The clause must say NOT SHARED, not merely "not sold"HighHIGH
POL-080 is one of 157 policy pages rules in the 915-rule 10DLC registry. Free to cite under CC BY 4.0.