I am looking for advice on a policy for creating new constituents.

An advancement officer is finding lists off the internet of board of directors of organizations in industries that we serve and asking me to create constituent records for the individuals on these lists. He'd like me to find mailing addresses for the businesses they work for, create constituent records with that business address as their primary address, and create relationships to the org. that they are on the board with.

These are people that have no interaction with us, or may not even know of our org. He is only interested in them because they are on the boards of orgs of industries that we serve. If i create records they could be looped into our invites for events, appeals, and publications without them opting in or even knowing of us.

Does anyone else do this? Seems like spam to me. Any help is appreciated.

I would not necessarily call it spam (since I purchase lists to include in acquisition mailings all the time) but I might call it a huge waste of time!

Is the primary expectation to keep them informed or to solicit them and convert them to donors? Either way I would just add them as relationship contacts on the org record as board members - not full constituents - and choose to mail to all contacts. I highly recommend you include in your mailings a way to contact you to request to receive no further mail.

As far as the research goes, you need to check with your team and supervisor and see where this fits in your proprity list. Sounds like a big project and not one that will be fruitful in many ways. Can you pawn it off on an intern?

If you are talking about snail mail to these harvested addresses then I'm with Melissa. Probably a big waste of time.

But since you used the word "spam" - if you are in the U.S. and harvesting email addresses from the internet and then sending unsolicited email to these individuals you may be in violation of the CAN-SPAM act of 2003 which prohibits the harvesting of email addresses.

Law or not - if you are sending unsolicited email you're a spammer.

I don't have a ton to add to this except to say I dig your username, despite the unfortunate state of the team this year.