Valid reasons are related to the operation of your non-profit. These reasons include: communicating with members, sending newsletters and invitations, service phone calls and emails, audit purposes, soliciting donations, and issuing tax receipts.

Invalid reasons are those that are not related to the operation of your non-profit. These reasons might include using the information for personal gain such as selling products to members.

Your non-profit should not collect information to use for invalid reasons. 

A non-profit’s purpose or mission is the reason it exists. This purpose or mission can be found in the non-profit’s constitution.

Personal information is that which is unique to an individual. Some examples include: name, address, email address, birthdate, SIN, gender, medical information, educational history, employment status, IP address, family status, and income.

Reasons related to employment include establishing, managing, and ending employment. Examples include collecting information about previous employment and maintaining personnel files, including records of disciplinary action.

An employee is a person hired by the non-profit to do work. 

Consent is permission. It means a person voluntarily agreed to the collection of their unique information. Consent can be express or implied.

Purpose means the reason(s) for collecting personal information and how it might be used. Non-profits may only use personal information for those reasons.

An example of collecting personal information is asking someone for their name and email address to include on a membership group email.