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What You Can Expect When Buying From A DMA Member
DMA, the leading trade association for business organizations using direct marketing techniques, advocates industry standards for responsible marketing to ensure that your rights are protected. The DMA holds their members to a stricter code of ethical standards that in many cases goes above and beyond legal requirements. To ensure that companies are marketing to you in a fair and honest manner, DMA has ethics committees to enforce DMA guidelines.

A DMA Member:
Is committed to its customers' satisfaction.
Clearly, honestly and accurately represents its products, services, terms and conditions.
Delivers its products and services as represented.
Communicates in a respectful and courteous manner.
Responds to inquiries and complaints in a constructive, timely way.
Maintains appropriate security policies and practices to safeguard information.
Provides information on its policies about the transfer of personally identifiable information for marketing purposes.
Honors requests not to have personally identifiable information transferred for marketing purposes.
Honors requests not to receive future solicitations from its organization.
Follows the spirit and letter of the law as well as DMA's Guidelines for Ethical Business Practice.
 

2) DMA Privacy Promise
The Privacy Promise is a public assurance that all members of the DMA, including DMA nonprofit members, will follow certain specific practices to protect consumer privacy. Specifically, the Privacy Promise requires their members to:
Provide customers with annual notice of their ability to opt out of information exchanges.
This provides you an opportunity to let companies know if you don't want your name, address or other information shared with other companies.
This requirement is even stricter for online marketers, which are required to provide notice of their own online privacy practices on their Web site;
Honor customer opt-out requests not to have this contact information transferred to others for marketing purposes.
Accept and maintain consumer requests to be on an in-house suppress file to stop receiving company solicitations from companies you do not currently do business with.
This means that if you ask a DMA member to stop sending you marketing promotions, they are required to honor this request; and
Use the DMA Preference Service suppression files for mail, telephone, and e-mail.

3) Guidelines for Ethical Business Practice
As a DMA Member, we are required to honor these guidelines, which reflect high levels of standards based on fair and ethical principles.  Members are also encouraged to ask other industry members that they work with to follow these self-regulatory guidelines. DMA's guidelines cover all modes of marketing, most notably online, telephone, and mail. And in many cases our guidelines go beyond the law. Some key provisions include:
Source of Consumer Name: Upon your request, marketers should disclose the source from which they obtained your name, address or other contact information, thus explaining why you might have received a marketing communication from that company.
Authenticating Marketing E-Mails: Marketers that use e-mail for communication and transaction purposes should adopt and use identification and authentication protocols to reassure consumers that the e-mail they send is actually from them, and not from a fraudster. Authentication helps prevent spam, which can harm consumers by causing problems such as ID theft.
No Marketing Calls To Cell Phones: A marketer should not knowingly place a call or send a voice or text message to a wireless telephone number for which the called party must pay the charge. The exception is in instances where the consumer (or business) provided the number to the marketer for that purpose. (Federal law only bans calls to cell phones if automatic dialing systems are used.)
 

4) Committee Complaint Resolution Process
DMA takes very seriously any violation of our Principles, Privacy Promise or Guidelines. Committees made up of DMA members investigate consumer complaints, work with marketers to resolve problems, and if necessary, censure companies publicly and refer possible illegal activities to the appropriate authorities.

5) Additional DMA Consumer Resources
DMA has a number of resources.  For more information, visit: www.the-dma.org