Worked at RightNow Media, the Christian streaming platform that churches purchase for their congregations. It’s kind of like Netflix for churches.
I left because I became uncomfortable with sales practices, particularly how church-member information was used to generate prospects for another product, RightNow Media at Work.
Here's how the process works:
1. Churches provided their members' email addresses.
Churches purchase subscriptions and supply congregation email lists so members could receive invitations to access the platform.
2. Members signed up for what they understood to be a church-gifted resource.
During signup, members could provide information such as their job title and phone number.
3. That information becomes a commercial sales lead.
If someone identified themselves as a manager, director, CEO, or another type of leader, their information is used to prospect them for RightNow Media at Work, a separate workplace subscription product. Even if you are a nurse manager, shift leader, regional sales manager, etc.
4. The company also used third-party data enrichment.
ZoomInfo is used to identify additional professional contact information, even when members hadn't provided their job titles directly.
5. Then came the sales outreach.
Prospects receive multiple outbound calls and repeated email campaigns. I also observed do-not-call requests being handled through temporary suppression periods of six months to one year.
Here's why this concerns me.
Someone whose church gifted them access to a Bible study platform may have no idea that their information could be used to identify them as a potential workplace sales customer.
I'm questioning whether people understand how their information would be used when they sign up for a Bible study.
RightNow Media's own privacy policy acknowledges that it receives member contact information from subscribing organizations and obtains information from outside data providers to expand records and identify new customers.
You can read it yourself:
https://rightnow.trusthub.com
That policy does not, as far as I've been able to establish, explicitly describe the particular church-member-to-workplace-sales process I witnessed.
My question for churches and their members:
Did you know your church-provided access to RightNow Media could potentially result in your professional information being used for workplace sales prospecting?
And if you're a church administrator, were you informed about this type of use when providing your congregation's email addresses?