Protect Your Phone Number when Starting Your Nonprofit
Many of the legal documents you are required to complete may require you to include a phone number for your nonprofit. Subsequent documents for your nonprofit such as bank accounts, grant applications, etc., may also need your phone number. Because so many documents require a phone number, it can put you in danger if it falls into the wrong hands. I highly encourage you to get a separate phone number for your nonprofit instead of using your cell phone number. Getting a different number for your nonprofit accomplishes a few things.
What a Separate Number Accomplishes
Benefits to having a phone number exclusively for your nonprofit include:
- It protects your privacy from the general public.
- It allows your nonprofit to have the look and feel of a professionally run organization.
- It can help you stay organized related to opportunities and responsibilities for your nonprofit.
How to Protect Your Personal Phone Number
There are a few ways to protect your personal phone number.
Call Forwarding
You can pay for or use a free call forwarding service. This service will give you a new dedicated telephone number for your nonprofit. The benefit is that the service will still forward calls directly to your cell phone. Some will even require that the caller identify themselves to choose if you want to take the call or not. You can research paid services such as eVoice or consider free services like Google Voice.
Live Receptionist
Another option is to hire a service to be a live receptionist. Instead of paying a salary plus benefits to a receptionist to answer all of your calls – you can use a call center that will answer calls for you. Instead of paying for an employee, you’re only paying for the number of calls that the service answers. The receptionist can gather information from the caller and will then typically text or email you a summary of each call to call them back. They can even connect you to the caller if you want to speak to them immediately. If you search only for “live receptionist,” you can view different company offerings and compare which one works for you.
Protect Your Nonprofit’s Phone Number
Nowadays, people get scam calls or spoof calls all the time. In addition to protecting your privacy, you should look into protecting the phone number of your nonprofit. That is because nonprofits have become a target for scammers, partly because they have information on donors and the ability to fundraise. Also, security procedures for nonprofit organizations don’t work as quickly as for-profit entities, which makes them easy targets for scammers.
To protect the phone number, you can register it with all the carriers (Verizon, Sprint, etc.). It may seem counterintuitive to register your nonprofit’s phone number with a company. Still, you can register with each carrier to prevent any scams. By registering the number with carriers, the companies will authenticate your number and tie it to your business to display your caller ID information on consumers’ phones.
If you need any help finding what is best for you, please don’t hesitate to contact us. Our team has helped thousands of people start and grow nonprofits that impact the world. If you want the best for your nonprofit, look no further than Chisholm Law Firm. We have a 100% success rate for our clients.
You can rest assured that your nonprofit is in the best hands and that we’ll get everything done right the first time. Call us today to schedule your free consultation.
We are here for you. It shouldn’t be this hard to be a superhero.