It is said that 2012 is going to be a difficult year for Charities to attract new, or even hold on to existing, donors.  A key to successful donor recruitment activity is accuracy of data and how simple the process of donating is. By utilising postcode lookup you can greatly reduce the number of keystrokes that need to be made and can be confident that the address information that you are capturing is accurate, after all most people class inaccurately addressed mail as junk even if you have an existing relationship with them.

Data8 provide a number of webservices which can increase accuracy of data collected in real-time. When combined, these services can help you to ensure you validate a mobile number, validate a telephone number, gather a PAF standardised address and a valid email address.

The validation services are easy to integrate with ASP.NET, PHP, Classic ASP and javascript code samples available to download from our own website. By increasing the accuracy of your data you can raise contact and conversion rates. Another great advantage of the UK address api is that you can reduce the number of keystrokes by 80%, thereby speeding up the registration process for your donor.

The European Commission (EC) announced a major change to the way Data Protection will be governed in a draft Data Protection Directive released yesterday.

This is serious news for any company that owns or processes data. Whilst this directive is only at draft stage, and there is a lot of lobbying to go that we might reasonably expect to take at least a couple of years, draft directives have a history of progressing to becoming law across all member states.

At the heart of the EC's intention is to simplify various complicated and disjointed laws in the various European member states, and to create one consistent directive ensuring fairness in a world that has changed enormously with regards to data and personal privacy in recent years.

According to James Mullock, Head of Technology at Osborne Clarke, the key points of the draft directive include:

• Explicit consent required in advance and on an opt-in basis
• The right to be forgotten
• An obligation to notify data protection authorities after a data breach
• Fines of up to 2% of global turnover

Concerns have been raised over quite what explicit consent means and how the right to be forgotten might adversely affect the operation of suppression files. Quite how all these changes might affect data cleansing is yet to be seen.

The DMA are claiming that the move towards an opt-in only regime for offline direct marketing has been softened compared to earlier versions however they warn against complacency as this could easily be reinstated in later versions. They have promised a fully analysis of the consequences to their members later this week.

For more information the EC has a comprehensive selection of press releases, factsheets and the full draft directive at http://ec.europa.eu/justice/newsroom/data-protection/news/120125_en.htm

In January 2012, the European Commission is scheduled to announce its revisions to the EU Data Protection Directive, this will have a direct effect on all in direct marketing and data cleansing.

It is supposed to contain some very significant changes to the current regime, such as the introduction of:

• an opt-in only regime, this may be an active opt-in
• a new ‘right to be forgotten’, the need to remove all transactional data about a customer
• additional requirements for a valid consent

This is as yet only draft legislation, we wait and see what it looks like in late January.

The DMA is on the case and is attempting to ensure that any changes are in the best interest of te industry. Once the proposed legislation is formally announced in January, they and we, in the industry, will have the chance to consider the changes and assess how they will affect the industry.

Personal data has been lost by 132 UK local councils since 2008, according to a report published by Big Brother Watch (BBW).

There were a total of 1,035 incidents of data loss between August 2008 and August 2011, with only 55 reported to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), the report added. At least 35 councils admitted to losing private information about children. At least 244 laptops, 98 memory sticks and 93 mobile devices were lost.

Big Brother Watch, commenting on the losses, said this highlighted a "shockingly lax attitude" to protecting confidential information by some councils.

Why councils feel the need to physically carry around data in this day and age is mystifying.

Data Security is very important to us at Data8 and we have prepared a white paper that outlines the best practice in transferring data to us. Data Security White Paper. This guidance is here to show you our recommended secure methods to transfer data.

Any company that stores or processes personal data is subject to the Data Protection Act (DPA). Increasingly, the ICO is clamping down on breaches of the DPA and simply losing a laptop with unencrypted data on is now potentially enough to result in an expensive fine.

Here are some useful links:

• Filezilla - a free FTP solution supporting FTPS and SFTP.
• GnuPG -  a free implementation of the OpenPGP standard.
• GPG4win - a free windows front end to support GnuPG.

Midata is the government's open data agenda. The plan is that all sorts of companies will make their data available, and then other firms will help consumers to manage it and build useful applications and services on the back of it.

This will mean that data held by say credit reference agencies will be available free to view. Callcredit is promising that every consumer will be able to look at their file for free for life, in a radical change to its business model.

Energy companies will make its customers' annual energy consumption data more easily accessible to make the process of switching suppliers easier.

Banks will be able to merge all transaction data so consumers can see where they have spent their money over the course of a year.

The obvious question that arises is data security, how secure is the data going to be.

At present I am struggling to see what the benefits would be to me, apparently over time midata will give me increasing access to my personal data in a portable, electronic format. I will then be able to use this data ‘to gain insights into my own behaviour, make more informed choices about products and services, and manage my life more efficiently’.

I have a mirror, bank statement and a wife, am I missing something, do I need any more data to gain insight into my behaviour.