How do I register a domain for a (UK) organisation with no postal address?

Question

I need to register a domain name for an organisation (which falls under the 'Other UK Entity' category). As I understand it at the moment, the organisation has no office or venue - we conduct our business by email and by meeting in places booked on an ad hoc basis. I can see that, these days, there must be a lot of online organisations/businesses with no physical location.

Unfortunately, it looks like Nominet, the .uk registry, requires all registrants to have a postal address. Of course, the people who run the organisation have their own addresses, and the organisation's member clubs have their own meeting places, but I don't think we can sensibly put down one of these as the address of our organisation.

As such, what are my options?

Answer 1

If your organization is really formally structured it is registered somewhere. When you registered it, you also had to put a postal address for it, no?

If so, use that one.

The address requirement is the idea (quite from the old day, but nevertheless) that if there is a problem with your domain, specifically a legal one, then the organization could receive letters at this address and act upon them.

Or use one of your members/meeting places but make sure to still have the organization as registrant name, not anyone else, or you may get in trouble later on when there are changes in your organization and so on.

Last solution is to use a proxy: find someone or some company that will put its details instead of yours. It is most often used for privacy reasons, or sometimes to do "stealth" registrations (like companies not wanting to show an upcoming product of theirs), but that will work too for your case. Make however extra sure that you have a good contract and relationship with such third party because if they are written as registrant of your domain name, all sort of nasty things could happen as the registry would not recognize you as the true owner.

Finally, do not hesitate to ask the registry directly. They should be able to help, you certainly are not the first case like this. See https://www.nominet.uk/contact-us/

Answer 2

The UK registry is very strict about this and they do check the address you provide to them (and as I remember, PO Boxes and the such aren't allowed) so if you need the domain, you'll need to use one of the members addresses.