Playbook: The BD4D Standard

Purpose. We are using Your Data to benefit You, Your community, humanity, and the planet, not for private gain or profit.

The Better Deal for Data starts with the good intent of the organizations that adopt the BD4D Commitments. These adopters back up this good intent with their actions, using data to support and improve the welfare of the individuals and communities they serve, rather than to create commercial value to enrich themselves. No one should be surprised about the data practices of a BD4D Adopter, especially not stakeholders who meet the definition of “You” in the BD4D Declaration.

• A BD4D Adopter must consider the people it serves, and collects data from, to ensure that its data activities clearly align with the community’s best interests, and that the benefits of the organization’s work actually flow back to those individuals or communities.
• It must engage its community to understand members’ expectations, ideas, and concerns about data collection, use, and sharing, aligning its activities accordingly. Its community should not be surprised by the organization’s data practices or activities.
• It must balance the potential for social benefit with the risk of human exploitation or harm resulting from its data practices when making decisions about data use.
• It must communicate sufficiently to all its stakeholders about how, and why, collected data will be used, shared, and stored. This often includes transparent disclosure about the organization’s data uses and data management practices, and the partners, vendors, and others who may also access that data.
• It must provide channels for its community to communicate directly with the organization about the organization’s activities or data practices. 
• A BD4D Adopter must be consistent: it cannot publicly declare its intent to abide by the Commitments, and then make material exceptions to those Commitments, whether explicitly in practice, in its terms and conditions, or in separate policy statements.

• Data use is contextual: what is appropriate for one organization might be entirely inappropriate for another. There are, however, some common practices that are generally acceptable or unacceptable for a BD4D Adopter.
  
  • For example, analyzing data about how people interact with a service in order to improve a program’s benefit, or sharing aggregated and anonymized data for funder or regulatory reporting, would both be acceptable.
  • Conversely, selling or trading a list with the names and phone numbers of program clients or donors, even if the list is being sold or traded to an aligned nonprofit organization, is not acceptable.
• Private gain or profit in the context of this Commitment pertains to for-profit activities, or the active selling or trading of nonpublic data that meets the definition of “Your Data.”

• This Commitment does not apply to an organization’s use of public government, open, or responsibly sourced commercially available data or information.
  
  • For example, a public interest organization compiling public data and offering it for a fee does not contradict this Commitment. 
• This Commitment does not apply when an organization generates revenue through programs that include, or are informed by, aggregated data, as long as that earned income is then used to support the organization’s programs, for the benefit of the organization’s community, or for greater social good.