PRIVACY POLICY 

Updated March 21, 2024

 

This Privacy Policy describes the policies and procedures of It Takes a Herd Inc. (“It Takes a Herd”, “we” or “us”) on the collection, use, security, and disclosure of personal information about you on https://www.ittakesaherd.org (the “Site”) and the services, features, content or applications offered by It Takes a Herd (collectively with the Site, the “Services”). It also describes your choices regarding the use, access, and correction of your personal information.

 

WHAT PERSONAL DATA WE COLLECT AND WHY WE COLLECT IT

When you visit the Site, we automatically collect certain information about your device, including information about your web browser, IP address, time zone, and some of the cookies that are installed on your device. Additionally, as you browse the Site, we collect information about the individual web pages that you view, what websites or search terms referred you to the Site and information about how you interact with the Site. 

 

When you purchase from us, we’ll ask you to provide information including your name, billing address, shipping address, email address, phone number, credit card/payment details, and optional account information like username and password. We’ll use this information for purposes such as, to:

 – Send you information about your account and order

 – Respond to your requests, including refunds and complaints

 – Process payments and prevent fraud

 – Set up your account for our store

 – Comply with any legal obligations we have, such as calculating taxes

 – Improve our store offerings

 – Send you marketing messages, if you choose to receive them

 

If you choose to create a store account, we will store your name, address, email, and phone number, which will be used to populate the checkout for future orders.

 

If you choose to create a forum account your name and email address along with whatever information you choose to provide in your profile is kept indefinitely in our website’s database or until a request to have it removed is received.

 

COMMENTS

When visitors leave comments or reviews on the site we collect the data shown in the relevant form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.

An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here.

After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment. User comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.

 

MEDIA

If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website.

 

CONTACT FORMS

When you use a contact form to send us a message, the information is sent as an email message.

 

We store user input data sent through the contact forms on this website, along with metadata information about the submissions, including the time stamp, the origin IP address, and the user agent (browser). 

 

Information submitted through a contact form will not be used for marketing purposes unless you have given us explicit permission to do so.

 

COOKIES

If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address, and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year.

 

If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.

 

If you visit our login page, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser. When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.

 

We use the Woocommerce plugin to manage our shop. Their cookie and privacy policy can be viewed here.

We use cookies on our website to improve our user experience. Your usage of this site qualifies as your acceptance of our cookie policy.

 

EMBEDDED CONTENT FROM OTHER WEBSITES

Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.

 

These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

 

For uniform representation of fonts, this page uses web fonts provided by Google. When you open a page, your browser loads the required web fonts into your browser cache to display texts and fonts correctly. For this purpose, your browser has to establish a direct connection to Google servers. Google thus becomes aware that our web page was accessed via your IP address. The use of Google Web fonts is done in the interest of a uniform and attractive presentation. If your browser does not support web fonts, a standard font is used by your computer. Google’s privacy policy can be found here.

 

ANALYTICS

We use Google Analytics to track various statistics about the usage and performance of pages on our site. We use this data to help us understand how well certain aspects of our site are performing and to decide how best to spend our limited resources in order to create the largest impact.

 

WHO WE SHARE YOUR DATA WITH

If you request a password reset, your IP address will be included in the reset email.

 

Members of our team have access to your information. Administrators can access all order and customer information. 

Our team members have access to this information to help fulfill orders, process refunds, and support you.

 

We share information with third parties who help us provide our orders and store services to you;

 

We use Give Lively to manage our donations and events. Information you submit through the Give Lively portal is subject to their privacy policy and terms of use..

Payments and donations are processed through PayPal or Stripe. When processing payments, some of your data will be passed to either provider, including information required to process or support the payment, such as the purchase or donation total and billing information. Please see the PayPal privacy policy and the Stripe privacy policy for more details.

 

HOW LONG WE RETAIN YOUR DATA

We will generally store information about you only for as long as we need the information for the purposes for which it was collected and as long as we are not legally required to keep it. For example, we will store order information for seven (7) years for tax and accounting purposes. This includes your name, email address, and billing and shipping addresses.

We are required to retain information about donations and donors indefinitely.

 

If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.

For users that register on our forum, we also store the personal information they provide in their user profiles. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.

Registered forum users’ data is retained indefinitely in our website’s database unless it is deleted by you.

 

WHAT RIGHTS YOU HAVE OVER YOUR DATA

If you have an account on this site or have left comments, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.

 

WHERE WE SEND YOUR DATA

Visitor comments and form submissions may be checked through an automated spam detection service.

We do not share your personal data with any third party unless we have your consent, at which point non-sensitive user data (email address, first and last name) may be shared with third parties as part of our email communications. You may opt-out of receiving these communications at any time.

 

HOW WE PROTECT YOUR DATA

We use Google Workspaces to manage our business, which includes email and records storage. Their privacy policy can be viewed here.

Your data is only accessible by our employees, to be used only for the purpose it was given, and in strict adherence to our ethics policy. We are legally required to keep donor records for a period of seven (7) years, this includes all purchases made through our website. All records are digital and never printed and are backed up to an encrypted hard drive located in our office.

 

CONTACT INFORMATION

If you would like your data removed from our system and we are not legally required to retain it you may submit a written request to either of the following addresses.

Requests for personal data may be sent to datarequest@ittakesaherd.org.

Written requests for data may be sent to :

   Data Request

   ℅ It Takes a Herd

   792 Kristin Ln

   Williamstown, NJ 08094-3566