Protecting the People Behind the Mission: How a Nonprofit-Focused MSP Addresses Digital Safety to Strengthen Client Security

Personified's cybersecurity lead explains how Kanary helps nonprofit-focused MSPs protect staff and clients from personal data exposure and online harassment.

Amanda Bennett, VP, Cybersecurity Services, Personified

When Amanda Bennett was doing digital security work for abortion access organizations, part of her role was to give technical advice for implementing privacy and online safety. That work gave her a front-row seat to what nonprofits actually needed, and what the market wasn't offering. The recommendations were sound, but the capacity to implement them was not always achievable.

That gap is what led Amanda to Personified, a managed service provider built around the idea that security isn't just a strategy, it's an operational commitment. Personified serves nonprofits, advocacy groups, and mission-driven organizations that face real digital threats and often lack the internal resources to address them. For those clients, having a trusted technical partner that manages privacy and safety is instrumental in allowing them to do their work.

“That connection changed everything for me. I saw how Personified wasn't just giving advice, it was giving organizations the capacity to actually act on that advice. That's what drew me to Personified. My role has evolved as the company has grown, but today I lead our cybersecurity services team. Cybersecurity is woven into everything we do, and I oversee our overall security strategy for clients and handle all security escalations.”

As the lead of Personified's cybersecurity services team, Amanda sits at the intersection of IT infrastructure and online safety, which in the nonprofit world increasingly means confronting harassment, doxxing, and the quiet erosion of personal privacy that can suddenly become very loud. It's in that context that Kanary became part of Personified's toolkit: first for their own team, then as a benefit they actively recommend to clients.

In this Q&A, Amanda talks about why personal data protection belongs in every organization's security posture, how AI is raising the stakes, and what she'd tell any MSP still on the fence about adding Kanary to their services.

Why Personified uses Kanary

What drove the need for Personified staff to adopt Kanary?

The decision was driven by the nature of our work both in security and aligned with mission-driven organizations. In any environment where employees' names are visible externally, there's a risk that someone, whether they're having a bad day or taking an unhealthy interest in you, decides to channel their attention your way. Our team has also had to handle difficult situations like involuntary offboardings, where they’re facilitating an equipment return with someone who has just gotten upsetting news. Those moments made people think: what if that person Googles me?

When your work exposes your name to a lot of people, you can never fully predict the kind of interest someone might take in you. Giving our team Kanary licenses raises that privacy barrier. If someone does decide to search for a team member, they won’t find data broker results for them.

What is the internal feedback on using Kanary?

People feel safer. There's something powerful about seeing all the places your data has been removed. It's genuinely scary to realize how much is out there, but experiencing that removal in real time makes it a much more reassuring process. Personally, I've been a Kanary customer since before I joined Personified, and thankfully I've never received one of those phishing texts pretending to be my boss asking me to buy gift cards. There are certain scam playbooks that clearly rely on the kind of data Kanary removes. That's a concrete benefit.

Why Personified offers Kanary to clients

What drove the decision to offer Kanary to Personified clients?

When we find something genuinely useful internally that proves its value, we want to offer it to our clients too. With Kanary specifically, we knew the value would resonate with our clients. Our clients come from mission-driven backgrounds: abortion access organizations, campaign work, climate justice and democracy advocacy. We've all watched people face online harassment campaigns, and you can't always predict when or why it might happen to someone. Even outside of advocacy spaces, one day you're in the right place at the wrong time, you're misidentified in a viral video, and suddenly the internet is coming for you. Because of our values alignment and our awareness of our clients' specific risks, they come to us with online harassment concerns even when those concerns aren't strictly within the scope of traditional IT support. We wanted a tangible resource to offer that had little friction for onboarding clients, and Kanary starts providing value within minutes.

“Online harassment and privacy isn't something IT MSPs typically handle. But individuals can't always tell the difference between a personal privacy issue and an organizational one. The human attack surface puts people and organizations at risk. We like being the expert for our clients by providing support for both.”

How do you roll Kanary out to clients? What services do you package it with and why?

We recommend Kanary to most of our clients, especially when they raise questions about online harassment or privacy. We include Kanary alongside process guidance, like making sure organizations have an online harassment response policy before they need one, and thinking through what support they can offer staff who experience an incident. We frame Kanary as a benefit to offer to all staff, proactively, rather than something you reach for only when an incident is already underway. Enrollment before anything happens is the whole point. You can't process data broker removals overnight, so you want baseline protections in place.

Beyond Kanary, we also help clients where IT overlaps with privacy & online harassment: setting up email quarantine filters so that harassing messages don't land in the target's inbox, or getting VoIP numbers set up so staff aren't using personal cell numbers for organizational work. Kanary fits naturally within that broader toolkit.

Why Kanary over the alternatives

How does Kanary stand out from alternative digital security and data removal services to specifically address the risks of your clients?

Kanary stands out from alternative options for a few reasons, but I'll start with what mattered most in the beginning: trust and clarity. When I was in my previous role at Digital Defense Fund, I was looking for a solution I could refer clients to without worrying about what would happen next. With other products, there was a lot of upselling in the sales process, and clients would feel like they were leaving someone unprotected if they couldn't afford the higher tier. That's a terrible experience. With Kanary, it was simple: here's the tier that meets your needs, here’s what you pay, here's what you get. That straightforwardness meant our clients didn't have to make stressful tradeoff decisions about who deserves protection.

There's also the feeling of working with a true partner. I remember years ago when Kanary asked me what it would take to refer clients to them instead of a competitor. I told them and within a week, they had built an enterprise account management option: the ability to see who had signed up, send invites, manage rollout. That kind of responsiveness, especially to the nonprofit sector's specific needs, is where a lot of my trust in Kanary comes from. It never feels like a sales relationship. It feels like a shared understanding of the risks our clients face.

What do clients report about using Kanary as part of Personified's broader digital risk and privacy services?

Generally, people feel relieved and supported, and the experience of seeing removals happen in real time is meaningful. It's unsettling to realize how widely your data has been distributed, but watching it get cleaned up as you go through the process makes it feel manageable rather than overwhelming. People who understand the risks of what it means when someone can easily Google your home address immediately see the value. For others, it sometimes takes an incident or a near-miss for the stakes to click. But once they do, the math is simple: a small investment = making it meaningfully harder for someone to find your team's addresses and phone numbers.

The evolving threat landscape

Has using and offering Kanary changed how you or your clients think about the role personal data exposure plays in an organization's overall security posture?

It reinforces something we already believe: that personal privacy is an organizational issue, not just an individual one. If you support your staff when they're being harassed, they're more likely to stay, even when the job exposes them to risk. If you don't, that's the kind of thing people leave over. The organizational cost of failing to protect people is real, even if it's hard to quantify. The more resources we can offer clients, and the more we encourage them to bring anything that looks like an online incident to us, the better we can help them distinguish between a personal privacy issue and an IT security incident, and provide resources and support either way. That's a better service for everyone.

How do you see AI's role in amplifying personal data risks, and how do you envision it impacting the evolution of your partnership with Kanary?

AI is the next step in a pattern that's been unfolding for decades. It used to be that public records were technically accessible but practically obscure. You had to go to a county clerk's office and ask someone to pull the file. That friction limited exposure. Then the internet digitized those records and made them searchable on the county clerk’s website, but there was still some barrier: you had to know where to look. AI removes even that. Now you can ask a natural language question and get a tool that clicks through sites and social platforms for you, removing the knowledge and time barriers from manual sleuthing.

That's a meaningful shift. The distinction between data that's in a Google result and data that isn't has always offered some protection. AI is going to make that distinction less meaningful. There's a whole group of people who would give up if they couldn't find you in a quick search. But as AI lowers the barrier to more sophisticated data aggregation, the value of keeping your footprint small becomes even more important, and the partnership between an organization like Personified and a tool like Kanary becomes more, not less, essential.

"It used to be that friction protected people. AI is eliminating that friction. The value of keeping your data footprint small has never been higher."

Advice for other MSPs

What would you tell another cybersecurity-focused MSP or nonprofit IT provider that is weighing whether to offer Kanary to their clients?

Think about breadth of coverage. Traditional IT MSPs often say online harassment isn't their problem. They expect individuals to deal with it on their own. If your clients feel like they can't come to you with something weird happening online, you might miss an early signal of a real security incident. More resources mean more reasons for clients to bring you their concerns, and that makes you a better service provider.

The practical case is also strong. You can get clients enrolled quickly, and the product is transparent and easy to manage. You can't predict what will put someone in the spotlight, but you can make sure they're protected when it happens.

Personified works with nonprofits, advocacy organizations, and mission-driven teams that can't afford to get security wrong. From data broker removal to incident response, they provide the technical capacity to turn good intentions into real protection, so the people doing the work can stay focused on the mission.

If you’re a non-profit looking for a mission-aligned MSP, contact Personified here.