It is not enough to have any protection program and notification system – they must be effective. Graduate students at Temple University’s Fox School of Business developed the Protection and Trust Scorecard for small and medium organizations. It includes all the U.S. government requirements for an effective protection program and notification system. More than three-quarters of the scoring is based on a notification system with these criteria:

• Hosted and managed by an independent third party
• Visible and easily accessible
• Simple to use
• Cloaks/protects the identity of notifiers

• Notifiers can check the status
• Confidential, two-way messaging
• Data can neither be hacked nor destroyed

If a notification system includes these, the organization will have a high Protection and Trust score, without them it will be low. What’s your organization’s score?