Montreal donor mobilization Law 25 and Bill 96 guide

What to take away

How Quebec Law 25 consent requirements change campaign design

Quebec Law 25 — officially An Act to modernize legislative provisions as regards the protection of personal information — raised the bar on what counts as valid consent. A pre-ticked box on a donation form no longer does the job. Consent has to be clear, free, informed, and given for specific purposes.

That changes the shape of a Montreal campaign before any creative work starts. You need to decide what each purpose is: a one-time gift receipt, a monthly giving appeal, a newsletter, a volunteer call-out. Each one gets its own ask.

Under Law 25, consent must be requested separately for each purpose, in clear and simple language. Bundling a newsletter sign-up into a donation is the mistake that shows up most often in audits and complaints.

The Commission d'accès à l'information du Québec is the body that oversees this, and its published laws and regulations set out how the regime applies to organizations collecting personal information in Quebec.

For campaign design, the practical effect is a shorter form with more deliberate choices. Ask for the gift. Then ask, separately, whether the donor wants updates. Then ask whether they want to be contacted by phone.

Timing also matters. Consent has to be obtained before the first message, not confirmed after it. A welcome email that says "you agreed to hear from us" is not consent if the box was never there.

If your organization also mails into Ontario or British Columbia, you are running two regimes at once. A comparison of federal and provincial privacy laws helps you see where the Quebec rules sit alongside provincial and federal ones, including the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act.

One more design point: consent records must be demonstrable. If you cannot show when, how, and to what a donor agreed, you are relying on memory. Build the record into the form, not into a spreadsheet someone updates on Fridays.

Bill 96 French-language obligations for Montreal donor appeals

Bill 96 tightened Quebec's language rules, and charitable solicitation sits inside them. If you are appealing to donors in Montreal, French is not a translation afterthought. It is the primary language of the appeal.

In practice that means the French version of a letter, email, landing page, or receipt must be at least as prominent as the English one. A French paragraph below a full English letter does not meet that standard.

The obligations reach further than most fundraising teams expect. They touch signage at events, intake forms, telephone scripts, and the wording of a monthly giving page. Even a thank-you call has a language dimension.

The Charter of the French Language, better known as Bill 101, is the statute that Bill 96 amends, and the Office québécois de la langue française is the body that enforces it. When a language rule needs checking, the Charter and the Office's published guidance are the starting point, not an internal style guide.

For a Montreal charity, the francophone donor base is not a niche segment. It is the core audience in most of the city and across much of the surrounding region. Treating French as a secondary version costs you response rate, not just compliance.

That has a copy consequence. A literal translation of an English appeal reads stiffly in French, and stiff copy does not raise money. Write the French appeal first, or hire a francophone writer to draft it rather than translate it.

Receipts are a common gap. A donor who gives in French should receive a receipt in French, with the same information as the English version. Mixing languages on one receipt is a compliance risk and a donor experience problem at once.

Costs add up here. Two full creative tracks, two sets of email copy, and bilingual donor service are real line items for a small Montreal team. Budget them at the campaign planning stage, not after the first mailing.

Collecting and recording consent from a francophone donor base

Consent collection in Montreal has to work in French first. If the consent language is only clear in English, you cannot show that a francophone donor understood what they agreed to.

Start with the wording. Write the consent sentence in French, then translate it into English. Keep it short enough that a donor reads it rather than skips it.

The Commission d'accès à l'information du Québec publishes guides and fact sheets that explain consent and other obligations in plain terms. Use them as the source for your form wording rather than copying another charity's page.

Here is a workable sequence for a Montreal campaign:

Recording is where most organizations are weakest. A donor who ticked a box on a paper pledge form at a Montreal gala needs the same record quality as an online donor. Someone has to key it in within days, not months.

Email consent has its own federal layer. Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation applies alongside Law 25, and the two do not always line up, which is why the federal anti-spam rules for charities are worth reading before you rebuild a list.

One worked example makes the stakes concrete. Suppose a Montreal food bank runs a spring appeal and pre-fills the update box for every online donor. A donor complains. The organization has to show consent, cannot, and must now re-consent its list at the worst possible moment in the calendar.

A cleaner version of the same campaign asks twice: once for the gift, once for updates, in French with an English option. Response to the update ask will be lower. The list will be smaller and defensible.

Privacy requests, access, and portability under Law 25

Donors in Quebec can ask what you hold about them. They can ask for a copy in a structured, commonly used format. They can ask you to stop using it, and in some cases to delete it.

These requests are subject to the timelines set out in Law 25, and a small nonprofit cannot absorb them informally. Law 25 also requires you to designate a person responsible for the protection of personal information and to post that person's title and contact information, so make the role public and give that person a documented process.

The Commission d'accès à l'information du Québec also publishes guidance aimed at private enterprises on protecting personal information. That guidance is the practical reference for how a charity should handle access requests and complaints.

Law 25 also imposes a confidentiality-incident duty. If personal information you hold is compromised, you have to notify the Commission and the people affected when there is a risk of serious injury, and you have to keep a register of confidentiality incidents.

Portability is the part most teams have not built. If a donor asks for their data in a portable format, you need to be able to export it from your donor database without a developer. Test that export before you need it.

Deletion is not absolute. You generally keep gift records for tax and audit reasons, so the answer to a deletion request is often a partial one: we removed you from appeals, and we retain the receipt record as required.

Say that clearly in French and English. A vague answer invites a complaint to the Commission, which can impose administrative monetary penalties, and complaints take staff time you would rather spend on the campaign.

Your donor database vendor matters here too. Ask where the data sits, who can see it, and what happens when you leave. A vendor that cannot answer those questions is a risk you are carrying on behalf of every Montreal donor on your list.

Practical campaign adjustments for Montreal nonprofits

Most of the work is unglamorous. Fix the form, fix the receipt, fix the record, then run the appeal.

That last item is easy to overlook. The Quebec Enterprise Number is the identifier the province assigns to registered enterprises, and the government's Québec Enterprise Number (NEQ) page explains what it is and how registration works for organizations operating in Quebec.

Campaign sequencing also shifts. If your list is not clean, a reactivation push will burn the names you have. A lapsed donor reactivation campaign built on confirmed consent performs better than a broad win-back blast to everyone who ever gave.

Track the steps a Montreal donor takes, from first gift to second gift, and mark where consent is captured at each stage. That record makes the gaps visible, especially the handoff between a paper pledge at an event and the online file.

Bilingual sending is a technical task as much as a copy task. Segment by language preference, and send the French version first to francophone donors rather than sending both and hoping. Law 25's consent standard and nonprofit email marketing practice point the same way here: fewer, better-targeted messages to people who asked for them.

Finally, expect the rules to keep moving. Law 25 has been phased in over several years, and the Commission's guidance is updated as organizations ask questions. Put a quarterly review on the calendar and assign it.

Common questions