Dutch charities invariably ask too much personal data from donors. According to the Donateursbelangen Foundation, it is not possible to donate anonymously at three-quarters of the charities and at least an e-mail address must be provided.
The Donateursbelangen Foundation researched 285 charities in the Netherlands. The foundation looked at the ways the websites had set up their online donation options. For example, the foundation not only inventoried whether anonymous donations were possible, but also whether, for example, the gender, address or date of birth of citizens had to be entered and whether the checkbox for telephone approach was checked by default. However, the foundation did not check whether there was any verification on that data; it is probably possible to enter an incorrect date of birth for many donations.
The biggest pain point seems to be donations that are only possible via iDEAL. At 208 of the 285 researched charities, it is only possible to donate via iDEAL, which means that a donation is not anonymous, according to the foundation. At a handful of charities it is possible to pay with Tikkie, for example, whereby the IBAN of a donor remains invisible. In 74 percent of the cases where payment was made via iDEAL, donations went through the providers Buckaroo and Mollie.
The foundation says that another 73 percent of charities require an email address and in 70 percent of cases it is mandatory to provide a name. For a quarter of the charities, a home address must be provided and in a fifth of the cases, receiving a newsletter is ticked as standard. With a remarkably high number of charities, it is not mandatory to accept privacy conditions in advance.
According to the foundation, there are several dangers in the fact that anonymous donations are not possible. For example, there would be a risk of identity theft and discrimination, for example if foundations only let people from a certain zip code area donate.
