MaryAnne
25-06-2008, 08:08 PM
You may have noticed a new forum in the COMMUNITY section for Charity posts.
We know UKS is a very giving community. But in the past we have had problems with people from outside our community joining just to post begging for funds for one charity or another. We have in place guidelines for what sorts of charity posts may be made, but in all honesty they seem to get ignored.
So we have thought long and hard about what is the best way to handle this - the guidelines are posted in the banner at the top of the forum for your review.
The important bits are that we still insist that if the post is requesting MONEY as opposed to goods, that the money can only be collected directly by the Charity, thru a page on their site, and not by a UKS member. We still insist that these may only be REGISTERED charities and the registration number be included in the post.
But we are now allowing people to post about Charity Crops and post requests for donations of old stash, with the requirement that a contact to the group or charity be listed, and not just the member's contact info should any member want to send donations directly or follow up on donations they have made.
So, if you are collecting stash for a kids club at your school, or for a group at the local hospital or drop-in center, you must post contact info for the charity/group, not just YOUR contact details.
For security purposes we would suggest you do NOT post phone or real address, but instead post an email address so you can get back to people with further details offline and out of public view.
Sig links, collecting funds for things like Race for Life are allowed, provided the registered number for the charity is included, and as above the link takes you to the charities offical page for sponsorship. You may not have a link for general donations, only for those events, again, like Race for Life, where the UKS member is actually doing something to generate the funds donated.
Putting the forum in Community, and making it announcement only/no replies is for a couple of very good reasons - for a start, although Community cannot be viewed by very new members (under 30 days) it is also not indexed on Google, so we do not have to worry about people joining UKS just to post requesting donations.
If you need more info, or need to discuss the specifics of a donation, contact the poster via PM or email, if they allow that.
In the future we will move any post regarding charity donations made outside this forum into the forum with no notification. Likewise, any post that does not follow the guidelines will be deleted without notification.
Our interest is to balance the giving nature of the UKS community with protecting the community from scams - and horrible as it is to consider, we all know there are people out there who will prey on people given the chance. We hope this will ensure that the charity requests on UKS are made only by established members and the information we ask for will make sure that anyone can follow up on a donation to satisfy themselves everything is being handled properly.
We know UKS is a very giving community. But in the past we have had problems with people from outside our community joining just to post begging for funds for one charity or another. We have in place guidelines for what sorts of charity posts may be made, but in all honesty they seem to get ignored.
So we have thought long and hard about what is the best way to handle this - the guidelines are posted in the banner at the top of the forum for your review.
The important bits are that we still insist that if the post is requesting MONEY as opposed to goods, that the money can only be collected directly by the Charity, thru a page on their site, and not by a UKS member. We still insist that these may only be REGISTERED charities and the registration number be included in the post.
But we are now allowing people to post about Charity Crops and post requests for donations of old stash, with the requirement that a contact to the group or charity be listed, and not just the member's contact info should any member want to send donations directly or follow up on donations they have made.
So, if you are collecting stash for a kids club at your school, or for a group at the local hospital or drop-in center, you must post contact info for the charity/group, not just YOUR contact details.
For security purposes we would suggest you do NOT post phone or real address, but instead post an email address so you can get back to people with further details offline and out of public view.
Sig links, collecting funds for things like Race for Life are allowed, provided the registered number for the charity is included, and as above the link takes you to the charities offical page for sponsorship. You may not have a link for general donations, only for those events, again, like Race for Life, where the UKS member is actually doing something to generate the funds donated.
Putting the forum in Community, and making it announcement only/no replies is for a couple of very good reasons - for a start, although Community cannot be viewed by very new members (under 30 days) it is also not indexed on Google, so we do not have to worry about people joining UKS just to post requesting donations.
If you need more info, or need to discuss the specifics of a donation, contact the poster via PM or email, if they allow that.
In the future we will move any post regarding charity donations made outside this forum into the forum with no notification. Likewise, any post that does not follow the guidelines will be deleted without notification.
Our interest is to balance the giving nature of the UKS community with protecting the community from scams - and horrible as it is to consider, we all know there are people out there who will prey on people given the chance. We hope this will ensure that the charity requests on UKS are made only by established members and the information we ask for will make sure that anyone can follow up on a donation to satisfy themselves everything is being handled properly.