Domains for charities and foundations

A small foundation restoring a village hall accepts an offer of help from a supporter who builds websites. The supporter registers the name, sets up hosting, points the mail somewhere sensible and hands over a working site. Three years later the supporter moves abroad, stops answering, and the foundation discovers that the address on every leaflet, every donation letter and every headed page belongs, in the only record that counts, to somebody else.

Nothing dishonest happened. The registration was a good turn done quickly, and good turns done quickly rarely include a discussion about registrant fields. The result is still the same as if it had been deliberate: the entity that raises the money does not hold the asset the money depends on.

What the organisation should hold

Control is made of separate pieces that travel together and are easily separated by accident. The registration itself, meaning the registrant of record in the registry. The account at the registrar, meaning the login that can move, renew or transfer the name. The DNS configuration, which decides where the website and the mail actually go. And the mailbox behind the address used for account recovery. A charity that holds the first two but not the last has less control than it thinks, because whoever receives the recovery mail can usually reach everything else.

The registrant should be the legal entity: the registered charity, the foundation, the association as constituted. Where the group has no legal form yet, the practical approach is set out in the registrant contact, and the underlying distinction between the registrant and whoever pays the invoice is explained in who owns a domain.

The supplier problem

Web agencies, hosting resellers and volunteer builders often register domains on behalf of clients as a matter of routine, and many do it properly, listing the client as registrant and themselves only as a technical contact. Others register the name inside a bulk account with the agency named throughout, sometimes because a reseller platform makes it difficult to do anything else. From the outside these two arrangements look identical: the site works, the invoices arrive, nobody looks at the register.

They stop looking identical the moment the relationship ends. A charity that wants to move to a different supplier, or that simply wants a copy of its own DNS settings, discovers whether it is a registrant or a guest. The question worth asking at the start of any arrangement, and worth asking again of any arrangement already running, is who is listed as registrant and which mailbox receives the renewal notices. A supplier who answers plainly is a good supplier. A supplier who treats the question as a lack of trust has answered it in a different way.

Donation pages and campaign names

Fundraising creates extra names faster than any other activity. A campaign gets its own address, a sponsored walk gets another, a legacy giving page gets a third, and each is registered by whoever was organising that campaign, often in a personal account, often with a card belonging to a member of staff who has since left. Two years on, a supporter follows an old link from a printed programme and lands on a parked page carrying advertisements, which is a poor look for an organisation asking for money.

The discipline that solves this is unglamorous: campaign names go into the same account as the main name, under the same registrant, on the same renewal list, and are either kept deliberately or allowed to expire deliberately. Deliberate expiry is a legitimate choice. What causes damage is expiry nobody noticed, and the stages that follow it are described in what happens after a domain expires.

Trustees change and the register does not

Charities turn over their trustees on a schedule written into their own constitutions, and the register of domain names knows nothing about that schedule. A name registered in the era of one treasurer is renewed by a card that belongs to a treasurer two generations later, until the card fails. Recording the domain in the same place as the bank mandates and the insurance policies, and treating it as an asset in the annual review rather than as an IT detail, is what keeps the two in step. The items that should physically pass from one volunteer to the next belong on a written handover list.

Making the claim provable

If the worst happens and control has to be reclaimed, the argument is made with paperwork rather than with indignation. Minutes recording the decision to register the name, invoices addressed to the organisation, correspondence in which the supplier describes the name as the charity's, and the constitution itself all help. A registrar dealing with a disputed account asks for evidence of the entity's identity and its connection to the registration, and a charity with a paper trail is in a far stronger position than one relying on the fact that everybody knows the site is theirs.

The test is simple: if the person who set the site up disappeared tomorrow, could the organisation still renew the name and move it. If the answer is uncertain, the answer is no.