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Direct Debit donor with no contact information

Patricia McKeen

We have a monthly donor that we haven't been able to contact for 2 years. They are direct debit, so we don't need to update card numbers. Last year for their annual tax receipt, it came back as invalid mailing address. Tried to call, phone number not in service and their email is no longer valid. With not having any contact, ethically I feel we should cancel their donation as we cannot even issue them a tax receipt without a valid address. Nothing on the CRA I can find says anything to the matter. Would love to hear thoughts and opinions on next steps.

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Comments

Crystal Bruce

@Patricia McKeen Hi! This is a great question. I'm going to see if any of my All-Stars can weigh in. Have you found out anything about this independently? If so, I'd love if you shared your findings!

Crystal Bruce

@Patricia McKeen tagging in @Carlene Johnson and @JoAnn Strommen to see if they can offer any best practice insight!

Carlene Johnson

@Patricia McKeen I'm US not Canada, but do agree that ethically it may make sense to terminate the gift.

Do you have any other research tools you can use to try to track down the donor? I know privacy rules are different than in US, but here I would use Lexis Nexis (paid service) or True People Search (free) to attempt to find an updated address and send a letter indicating you are trying to update contact information. You may also be able to find updated email addresses via those services.

I wonder, too, if you could contact the bank and ask the bank to contact the donor on your behalf requesting that the donor reach out to you.

You may have already tried/thought of these ideas, but if not, I hope they are helpful. Let us know how things turn out!

Patricia McKeen

@Carlene Johnson unfortunately, any information that we can find online gives us the invalid mailing address and phone number. I hadn't thought about reaching out to the bank, but I am pretty sure due to privacy here in Canada, that they won't contact the donor on our behalf, but it is worth a try! Thank you