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The rules you inherit

A guide for the person who has to sign this off · 22 September 2026

The moment your members raise money on a page with your logo on it, a set of decisions becomes yours whether you make them or not. Making them deliberately takes an afternoon. Discovering them takes a complaint.

This is not legal advice, and the details differ by country and by what kind of body you are. It is the list of questions we have seen decide whether a platform is a quiet success or a recurring problem, and the shape of the answers that tend to work.

Who is allowed to raise money

The most important rule and the cheapest to enforce. Three common settings:

• Members only, checked against your membership record. The safest, and the one that makes your brand mean something on the page.
• Members plus invited others — a coach, a chaplain, an alumnus, a partner organization — created by someone on your staff.
• Open, with approval. Anyone can apply, a human says yes. Works when the cause is broader than the membership, but budget for the moderation.

Whatever you choose, write down who can approve and who can reverse an approval, and make sure both are people who will still work there next year.

Fundraisers under 18

This is not a policy choice, it is a constraint. Regulated payment providers will not open an account for a minor, so a junior member cannot be the one who gets paid. The workable patterns are:

• A parent or guardian holds the payout account, and the page names both the young person and the responsible adult.
• The club or organization holds the account for junior members and spends against an agreed purpose — which puts you back into holding other people's money, so do it knowingly (see where the money actually goes).

Alongside that, your safeguarding policy already covers photographs, full names, locations and contact details of children. A fundraising page is a public profile of a young person, so it is covered too. Decide what a junior page may show, and make the platform enforce it rather than trusting each family to remember.

What may be raised for

A scope sentence does more work than any other line in your policy. “Costs directly related to competing and training as a member of an affiliated club” rules out a thousand awkward conversations in eleven words.

Some categories should be excluded outright, because they are separately regulated almost everywhere and a fundraising platform is the wrong vehicle for them:

• Lotteries, raffles and prize draws. If a contribution buys a chance to win, it is gambling in most of Europe and needs a licence.
• Investment, equity or lending. If a supporter expects a financial return, that is a regulated activity.
• Anything promising goods or services in return beyond a token acknowledgement — that is a sale, with consumer rights, VAT and delivery obligations attached.
• Political campaigning, which carries its own donation-reporting rules.
• Medical treatment appeals, unless you are ready for the scrutiny and the emotional escalation that come with them.

Is it a donation?

Usually not, in the legal sense, and saying so clearly protects everyone.

A gift to an individual is generally not a tax-deductible charitable donation, even when the individual is a member of a charitable organization and even when the cause is obviously good. Supporters assume otherwise, and an unhappy supporter in March is a supporter who will not give again.

Two things to put in writing on every page:

• Who receives the money — the named individual or team, not the organization.
• That it is not a tax-deductible donation, and that supporters should take their own advice.

Tell fundraisers, too, that money they receive may be income or a gift depending on their country and their circumstances, and that large gifts can have thresholds attached. They should ask someone qualified; you should not be the one who guessed.

Data protection

If the platform carries your brand and your rules, you are very likely a controller for the personal data on it: the fundraisers, the supporters, the messages. That brings obligations that do not go away because a vendor built the software.

• Your own privacy notice for the platform, telling fundraisers and supporters what happens to their data and who to contact.
• A data processing agreement with whoever runs the platform, and clarity on where the data is hosted. If your members are in the EU or the UK, ask for hosting there.
• A route for access, correction and erasure requests, including the awkward case of a supporter who wants to be forgotten from a gift record you have to keep for accounting.
• A rule on marketing: a supporter who gave to one member has not consented to hear from your organization about everything else.

Moderation and takedown

You will need to remove a page. Someone will write something careless, leave the organization, fall out with a coach, or turn out to be raising money for something outside the scope. Decide in advance:

• Who can unpublish a page, and how fast — minutes, not a support ticket.
• What happens to money already raised, and to monthly supporters mid-mandate.
• What the fundraiser is told, and what supporters are told.
• Whether there is an appeal, and to whom.

Write the answers down before launch. In the moment you will be under pressure and the decision will be made badly.

The one-page policy

Every platform we build starts from this page, filled in with the organization, before anyone talks about colours. It is the fastest way to find out whether a platform is a good idea at all.