Privacy Policy

Introduction

Your privacy is important to us, and we want to comply with both the letter and the spirit of applicable privacy laws and regulations as a US-based company with a marketing focus on New York state. This policy applies to all the websites operated by North Star Fund (“we” or “us”) but not any of our offline data collection. If you find content or become aware of an interaction on a website owned by North Star Fund you believe violates our Privacy Policy, please contact us immediately at the address listed below.

We make decisions about our web-based data based on four principles:

1. We don’t ask you for personal information online unless we truly need it to serve you better or to accomplish a clear goal.
2. We don’t share your personal information with anyone except to comply with the law, complete a relevant task or protect our rights.
3. We don’t store personal information on our computers unless required for the ongoing work of our organization.
4. We use cookies to improve our communications, in some cases third-party cookies. More on that in our cookie section below.

Websites

Like most website operators, North Star Fund collects non-personally-identifying information of website visitors. This is the sort of information that web browsers and servers typically make available, such as the browser, language preferences, referring website, and the date and time of each visitor request. We collect non-personally identifying information so that we can improve the user experience on our websites. From time to time, we may release aggregated non-personally-identifying information about how people use our website.

Visits to our websites may also trigger the collection of potentially personally-identifying information like Internet Protocol (IP) addresses or user submission information. This data is used to improve the user experience of our website and to provide services to our website users.

Personally Identifiable Information We Collect via our Websites

In order to monitor our website performance and improve our website, we collect and store certain device information about your computer, mobile device, or other device that you use to access our websites and online communications. This information may include IP address, geo-location information, unique device identifiers, browser type, browser language and other browser information. This information is only used for website purposes and is only accessible to people who work on improving our web content delivery.

There are a number of circumstances in which you may provide us with your personal information on one of our websites. The most common ways in which we collect your personal information on our websites are:

• When you sign up to receive email newsletters from us
• When you register for, or participate in our events (both online and offline events)
• When you make a donation to us
• When you request information or assistance for us via our website forms
• When you inquire about or apply for a grant from us
• When you inquire about our donor-advised services
• When you inquire about employment with us or apply for a job
• When you participate in online surveys or online chats with us
• When you interact with social media accounts managed by North Star Fund on sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn or Snapchat.
• When you provide user-generated content on any part of any of our websites that allow this

In these instances:

• We collect your name, email address and other contact information
• We may collect demographic data such as age group, gender, or geo-location
• We may collect public social media accounts associated with your email address
• We track pages you have visited on our websites and content that you may have viewed on our websites.

This information is only available to staff for tasks directly related to our programs and fundraising, and is kept in systems with password protection and only transmitted over secure connections. We do not share information with third parties except as described later in this policy.

Cookies

Like many websites, we use small files (called cookies, web beacons, flash cookies or tracking pixels) to improve our users’ experience of our websites, learn about how users are interacting with our content and to customize the user experience. These files are placed on your computer or mobile device. You can learn more about cookies (for example, how they are different from viruses and other malicious code) at AllAboutCookies.org.

Our websites will function without your acceptance of some cookies, but in that case, some website features or functions may not be optimal for you.

We use web beacons provided by MailChimp or other email services to collect information about content we’ve created that users have viewed or clicked on. That information is stored for us in MailChimp, but we do not share that information outside our organization.

We use session cookies, long-term cookies and third-party cookies:

For personalization: Cookies from Gravatar (third-party), Boxzilla (third-party), WordPress.com (third-party)

For analytics: Cookies from Google Analytics (third-party), Crazy Egg (third-party), WordPress Stats (third-party)

Third Parties

We periodically use independent contractors and third-party agents or partners to perform functions such as marketing, analytics, secure donation processing, fraud prevention, computer maintenance and other services on our behalf.

These entities have access to personal information necessary to perform their functions and are contractually obligated to maintain the confidentiality and security of any personal information collected through their business with us.

They are restricted from using, selling, distributing, or altering this data in any way other than what is needed to provide the services we have contracted with them to perform.

Protection of Information

We take all measures reasonably necessary to protect against the unauthorized access, use, alteration or destruction of personally-identifying information we have access to or store.

Privacy Policy Changes

This Privacy Policy is in effect as of May 24, 2018. Any further changes to this policy will be posted at this same URL (https://northstarfund.org/privacy) with their effective date. Continued use of our any of our websites signifies your agreement with this policy.

If you have any questions or requests regarding this policy, if you would like to change your preferences, if you no longer wish to receive email updates from North Star Fund, or if you believe North Star Fund has erroneous or incomplete information about you, please send an email to comms-team@northstarfund.org.