Is it legal in US to call people to solicit donations without prior consent?
Thursday, March 11th, 2010 at
2:02 am
Is it legal to get phone numbers off the internet or from a marketing firm and call people in the US to solicit donations for a non-profit organization registered in the US?
If there are any US laws that prohibit such activities, could you please provide some detail about them?
Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!
Yes, that is legal. You can add your number to the do-not-call list, but I believe there is an exception for non-profits.
There is no law that prohibits this.
Even the Federal "Do not Call" list applies only to commercial solicitation, not charitable ones.
Richard
If the person has added their phone number to the "do not call" registry, you can be heavily fined for calling them to solicit donations. The only exceptions to this are companies the person has done business with in the past 12 months. We thank our government very much for passing this law, however, the law still allows political fund-raising organizations to be exempt from this list. (???)
If they call you and leave a message to leave a donation, then that leaves you open to the 12-month window.