We at America Needs You want our website americaneedsyou.org to be a safe and private place for our visitors. We ask that you read this policy prior to using our website.
For most features on our website, you will not need to register or provide any information at all to access its various sections and features. There are certain actions and areas of our website that will require you to provide personal information, such as:
Any time that you provide personal information on our website, this privacy policy will govern our use of the information that you provide.
By submitting personal information to us, you agree that we may use the information in accordance with this privacy policy. We will update this privacy policy as we deem necessary. You should be sure to reread this policy in its entirety from time to time.
Personal Information You Choose to Provide
In order to gain access to certain areas of our website or to use certain features, you may choose to provide personal information. If you do submit information to us, we will use that information for the purposes for which it was submitted. We may also use your information in other ways, such as to contact you about America Needs You related activities and events and we may share your information with other like-minded organizations, for similar purposes.
For example: If you make an online donation to us, your information will be added to one or more of our supporter lists and databases, and you will be contacted about other America Needs You activities, news, and/or fundraising campaigns. If you join or opt-in to our supporter network, you will receive informational updates about our programs and activities. Our supporter network is primarily an electronic network, and therefore we need an e-mail address to contact you. We will also ask for your full postal address in order to send you hard-copy information that you may request. If you use our website to submit your resume or materials for a fellowship, paid, volunteer, or mentor position, your information will be stored in a centralized database that we will use primarily for our own business and charitable purposes.
We also may provide opportunities for you to submit additional personal information, such as general website feedback. By submitting this information to us, you give us permission to receive it, review it, edit it, store it, post it on our website, and use it in appropriate settings designed to illustrate the importance of our charitable mission. To protect your privacy if you submit general website feedback, please do not include any information in your submissions that you would not like shared with others who will use our website.
You should be aware that in the future we may use third-party vendors to provide services on our website and in our offline operations. The information that you submit on our website may be provided to those vendors on a confidential basis so that those vendors can provide services (such as maintaining our databases, sending e-mail messages to supporters, facilitating our fundraising activities and campaigns, or processing transactions) on our behalf.
Other than as described in this privacy policy, or as may be necessary to protect the rights, property, and safety of our organization, our supporters, or others, or as may be necessary to comply with applicable law, we will not give or sell the personal information you provide online. We also reserve the right to share personal information you provide with legal authorities if it is, in our sole opinion, necessary to investigate, prevent, or take action regarding suspected fraud, situations involving threats or potential harm, or if required by law (such as by a subpoena, court order, or other legal means).
Financial Information You Choose to Provide
If you choose to make an online donation, which is not required to apply for a fellowship, paid, volunteer, or mentor position, you will have to provide your credit card billing information. As this information is collected and transferred over the Internet to our secure server, it is encrypted using Secure Socket Layer (SSL) technology, the industry standard security technology that is designed to protect sensitive information. Our donation pages display the Verisign Secure Site Seal to assure you that our website is authentic and that all transactions are secured by SSL encryption. If you are making a donation, the credit card information that you provide at the time of donation is used only to process your donation and will not be used for any other purposes.
Information Automatically Collected and Stored
As is true of most websites, we may automatically collect and store some information about your computer and your visit and store it in log files. This information includes information such as your computer’s (or your ISP’s) Internet Protocol (IP) address (this is not your e-mail address); the domain from which you access the Internet (e.g., “verizon.net” or “cuny.edu”); the name, version, and specifications of your computer and your computer’s operating system; the Internet address of the website, if any, from which you came to our website; the date and time you arrived at our website and how long you spent on the site; and which pages you visited. We use this information to formulate statistics (possibly with the help of outside experts) that show the number of visitors to the different sections of our website and to help us make our website more useful to visitors. For example, we use the browser information to help us design our website so that as many people as possible will be able to view the pages correctly. These statistics do not reveal personal information.
Use of Cookies
Cookies are small text files that are either placed on your computer’s hard drive (“persistent cookies”) or in your computer’s Random Access Memory (“session cookies”). We may use both persistent cookies and session cookies for various sections of our website.
Session Cookies: We may use session cookies to make it easier for you to navigate certain sections of our website. If you choose to provide personal information by using an interactive application on our website, such as by joining our e-mail supporter list, making an online donation, applying for a mentor position, or asking a question, we place a session cookie on your computer so that you will be recognized as you move around our website pages. Unless you opt-in to change these session cookies to persistent cookies (see “Persistent Cookies” below), the information is only used for the duration of your browser session. For example, if you join our supporter network and then navigate through different pages of our website, the cookie will maintain the information you entered when you filled out the supporter registration page. As you move through the site, any fields requiring information about you that has already been captured will be pre-populated. However, once you close your browser window, the session cookie times out. If you open a new browser window and return to our website, your personal information fields will not be pre-populated.
Persistent Cookies: We may use persistent cookies in some sections of our website to provide greater accuracy in our analysis of the information that is automatically collected about your visit to our website. A persistent cookie remains on your hard drive for an extended period of time. These cookies do not collect personal information. We do not link the information collected through these cookies with other personal data that you provide to us.
In certain circumstances, you may be given the option to turn a session cookie into a persistent cookie on your computer (e.g., “Would you like us to remember your password?” messages). If you opt to turn a session cookie into a persistent cookie, that persistent cookie will remember your personal information and will not time out at the end of your browser session. See “Your Help is Needed” for more information.
Disabling Cookies: Persistent cookies leave a record on your computer that you have visited our website. However, you have the ability to remove cookies from your computer. Your Internet browser’s “Help” section will give you information on how to delete cookies. In addition, there are many websites that provide browser- and operating system-specific information on how to delete cookies. When thinking about whether you want to delete cookies, you should be aware that some sites require cookies to function properly. If you delete cookies, you may have to re-register with some sites or you may notice difficulty in browsing some sites after you delete cookies.
Clear Gifs (Web Beacons)
Although we do not currently do so, we may employ a software technology called clear gifs (a.k.a. Web Beacons) that will help us better manage content on our website by informing us what content is effective. Clear gifs are tiny graphics with a unique identifier, similar in function to cookies, and are used to track the online movements of Web users. In contrast to cookies, which are stored on a user’s computer hard drive, clear gifs are embedded invisibly on Web pages and are about the size of the period at the end of this sentence. We do not link the information gathered through clear gifs with other personal data that you provide to us.
Online Advertisements From time to time, we may run online advertisements on third-party websites to attract visitors to our website or to alert our supporters to special opportunities. Our advertising partners may use cookies and clear GIFs on this site and on the third-party sites on which our ads appear, which allow the advertising partner to track certain information about user behavior, such as “click-stream data.” Any use of information by an advertising partner would be governed by their terms of use and privacy policy, so be sure to be familiar with these policies prior to responding to online advertisements.
Security
Information submitted via the Internet, including through a web page or e-mail is subject to interception or incorrect routing, and the Internet is not a fully secure communications channel. Please consider this prior to submitting any information to us via our website.
Certain sections of our website may have heightened security measures in place to protect the loss, misuse, and alteration of the information you have provided. The security measures used on our website may include, but are not limited to, industry-standard Secure Socket Layer (SSL) technology, Verisign certificates, firewalls, and internal policies to maintain the security of stored data. While we follow generally accepted industry standards to protect the personal information submitted to us, no method of transmission over the Internet, or method of electronic storage, is 100 percent secure. Therefore, while we strive to use commercially acceptable means to protect your personal information, we cannot guarantee its absolute security.
Remember, breaches of security also can occur when users are not vigilant in protecting their own information. The next section of our privacy policy suggests some actions you can take to help control the security of your personal information.
Your Help Is Needed
Although we do our best to protect your privacy on our website, we need your help.
You have control over your own privacy. Think carefully before providing any personal or financial information online.
Although our website may have security measures in place to protect the loss, misuse, and alteration of the information you have provided, no e-mail or Web transmission is completely secure against interception. If you are worried because your communication is very sensitive, do not send it electronically.
When you write to us for most matters, you will likely need to identify yourself for a variety of business purposes. However, if you desire to remain anonymous for some reason, you should not tell us your name, the names of other users, or of your associates. To fully protect your privacy, you should try to keep out any information that you think may identify you or others.
Remember that we cannot protect your privacy once you leave our website, such as by “hyperlink.” So when you visit other websites, check each one’s privacy policy yourself, and be careful about the information you submit or share.
You should be aware that in some areas of our website we utilize personalization measures designed to make your website experience more enjoyable (i.e., personalized links in e-mail that allow data fields to be pre-populated with certain personal information). We need your help to protect the information embedded in these links. You should always keep your e-mail account information secure and not allow others to access your e-mail account.
In addition, you should only forward our e-mail messages or other website information to others through the buttons or links provided within the e-mail or website. When you use your e-mail system’s forwarding capabilities, others may be able to take actions in your name and/or access your personal information.
You may be given the option to turn on a persistent cookie on your computer (see “Use of Cookies” above). Remember that once you have set a persistent cookie that is linked to your personal information, anyone can access your personal information by using your computer.
In addition to the records left on your computer by cookies, your browser and operating system contain other records of your Web browsing and other actions (e.g., browser history). As with cookies, you can find information about how to clear these history trails in your browser’s “Help” section or through other websites that provide detailed information for each browser and operating system. See “Use of Cookies — Disabling Cookies” above.
How to Unsubscribe or Contact Us About Your Information
If you wish to review the contact information we have on file for you, correct your contact information or provide a change of address, unsubscribe from our email list, or inform us how you wish your contact information to be used, please contact our staff (see below).
You may contact us by mail, e-mail, or telephone, as follows:
Mail:
Supporter Services
America Needs You
82 Nassau St #60358
New York, New York 10038
info@americaneedsyou.org
If we decide to change our privacy policy, we will post those changes here, so that you are continually aware of what information we collect, how we use it, and under what circumstances, if any, we disclose it. We reserve the right to modify our privacy policy at any time, so please review it frequently.
© 2021 America Needs You. All rights reserved.
