Choose software your team will use and your supporters can trust

With Privacy-by-Design Software Selection, we manage every step of your process, from gathering requirements to signing the contract, with audience consent built into each stage.

When it’s time for a new solution, Raise HECK and Agility Lab guide you through every step of choosing the right one for your mission and goals. As your concierge through the buying process, we keep vendors focused on your requirements while your staff stay focused on the work that matters most.

Along the way, we show you exactly how each tool will collect, use, and share your supporters’ data, so you can choose with confidence and start out ready to meet data privacy regulations.

How It Works

Our process follows five steps. At every step, privacy is part of the work itself. It shapes what you require, what you score, what you sign, and how your team uses the tool.

STEP 1: Needs and Requirements. We gather what your organization needs from every stakeholder group. Alongside those conversations, we ask whose data the tool will hold and what you have already promised those constituents about how their personal information will be used. Your privacy notice, consent language, and supporter expectations become requirements from day one. We also confirm which data the tool truly needs, so you do not collect or migrate more than your mission requires. This keeps your overhead costs as low as possible while also ensuring compliance with data minimization requirements in state and international laws.
STEP 2: Request for Proposal. We choose the right approach for your situation: a request for proposal, a request for information, or an invitation-only process. Privacy questions sit inside the core requirements, not as a standalone in an appendix. Every vendor must explain in writing how its tool records consent, limits staff access, honors deletion requests, and protects your data. We handle all vendor communications and logistics.
STEP 3: Evaluation and Demos. We score every response with one rubric that weighs functionality, usability, cost, and data practices together. Before scoring begins, we agree with you on which privacy answers are dealbreakers and which are preferences. Demos include real privacy scenarios, such as processing a deletion request or honoring an opt-out. A vendor that cannot show you how it handles these scenarios is telling you something, and you hear it while you still have other options.
STEP 4: Contracting. We make sure that what the vendor promised in the demo is what appears in the contract. That includes the data protection terms that matter most: who owns your data, what the vendor may do with it, and what happens to it when you leave. We prepare these terms in plain language so your legal counsel knows exactly what to secure.

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Why Does Privacy Belong in Software Selection?

Too often, organizations experience privacy as a cleanup problem — something to resolve reactively, after the tool is already chosen, the contract signed, and the data flowing. By then, the fixes are expensive.

Selection is the moment you have the most leverage. Vendors are competing for your business, so you can require clear answers, compare them side by side, and walk away from a vendor that cannot answer. This process uses that leverage from the very first step.

This Service is for You if...

You’re preparing to choose a new CRM, website platform, or email tool and want a selection process that gets you the right fit without creating privacy risk down the road.

The service is especially valuable for executive and operations leaders, heads of fundraising and digital programs, database and IT managers, and legal counsel who share responsibility for the decision.

This service is a strong fit in any of these situations.

Your organization is replacing or adding a tool that will hold donor, member, client, or alumni data.
Your organization has made privacy commitments to supporters and needs a tool that honors them.
A past tool selection created cleanup work that you do not want to repeat.
Your selection team needs to judge vendors’ data practices but does not include privacy expertise.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Have questions not answered here? Reach out to us here.

Why work with us?

Does this replace our legal counsel?

Which tools does this cover?

We already have a vendor in mind. Is it too late?

What's a typical project timeline?

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NICE TO MEET YOU

We're Charlotte, Elyse, and Sally.

Together, we bring decades of experience working inside nonprofits and the technology companies that serve them. Sally spent 13 years at GetActive, Convio, and Blackbaud, where she oversaw the needs of some of the largest nonprofit brands in the world. Charlotte spent six years helping build an agency’s digital marketing team from the ground up and six more building strategic partnerships at Blackbaud. Elyse has spent 20 years in marketing, revenue-generation, and technology roles at major nonprofits, so she knows what it takes to protect supporter data while still hitting your growth goals.

We know the weight that comes with choosing new technology. You need a tool your staff will actually use, and you need to keep leadership informed about cost and risk while still delivering that 10% year-over-year growth goal. Meanwhile, privacy expectations keep rising, and vendors have every incentive to put their own bottom line first. It’s a lot, isn’t it?

We built the service we would have wanted when we were in your seat. It takes the fear out of finding the right technology and builds privacy in from the start. Let us take some of the weight off you.

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