Privacy policy

This policy describes what happens to information you share with Living Springs Global Fellowship through this website. It covers the pages on livingspringsglobal.org and the forms on them.

It does not cover the separate giving platforms we link to, or any other website you reach from a link here. Those services have their own privacy policies, and we encourage you to read them before entering personal or payment information.

There are two places on this site where you can send us information.

• The contact form. We ask for your name, your email address, the kind of conversation you would like to have, and your message. An organization name is optional. You also have to tick a box giving us permission to reply, because we do not want to assume it.
• The newsletter signup. We ask only for an email address, and we record which part of the site you signed up from so we know what you expected to receive.

Please do not send us sensitive personal information, medical details, or information about a child through these forms.

This website does not take payments. It has no card fields, no bank fields, and no checkout of its own. Every gift is handled by an outside giving platform: Subsplash Giving, PayPal, or Givebutter. Your card or bank details are entered on their systems, not ours, and this website never receives or stores them.

The platform that processes your gift does share donor records with us, typically your name, your email address, the amount, and the date. We use that to thank you, to keep our own records, and to meet our obligations as a charity.

Each platform is an independent company with its own privacy policy and its own security practices. Read theirs before you give, and use whichever you are most comfortable with.

Like almost every website, ours runs on servers that keep operational logs. These normally include the address of the request, the page requested, the time, and basic browser information. They exist so the site can be kept running and secure.

When you submit a form, we also store a one-way hashed version of your network address. This lets us tell that the same source has submitted many times in a short period, which is how we hold back automated spam. It is a hash, not a readable address, and we do not use it to build a profile of you.

Our forms also carry a hidden field that ordinary visitors never see or fill in. If it arrives filled in, the submission is treated as automated. We do not use a third-party CAPTCHA service, so nothing about you is sent to one.

This website sets no advertising cookies, no tracking cookies, and no analytics cookies. We have not installed Google Analytics, a Meta pixel, or any comparable measurement tool. That is why you are not being asked to dismiss a consent banner: there is nothing non-essential to consent to.

Two exceptions, both essential and both limited to people who sign in. Staff who log in to the private administrative area have a sign-in session stored in their own browser so they are not asked to sign in on every page, and their layout preference is remembered. Neither applies to public visitors.

The outside giving platforms may set their own cookies once you interact with their forms or pages. That behaviour is governed by their policies.

These are the outside services this website actually uses.

• Hosting and database. The site and its database are hosted on managed cloud infrastructure. Contact messages and newsletter subscriptions are stored there.
• Email delivery. Resend sends the message that notifies our team, the acknowledgement you receive, and any newsletter we send.
• Giving platforms. Subsplash Giving, PayPal, and Givebutter, as described above.
• Web fonts. The site loads its typefaces from Google Fonts, which means your browser makes a request to Google when a page loads.

We do not sell information to anyone, and we do not hand it to service providers for their own marketing.

• To read and reply to your message.
• To send the updates and prayer requests you asked for.
• To acknowledge and record a gift, and to keep the accounts a charity has to keep.
• To keep the site working, and to stop abuse of the forms.

Sending us a contact message does not add you to the newsletter. Those are separate choices, and we keep them separate on purpose.

Only in these situations.

• With the service providers listed above, so they can do the specific job we use them for.
• With our own staff and volunteers who need it to reply to you or to care for a supporter relationship.
• Where the law requires it, or where it is genuinely necessary to protect someone from harm.

We do not sell, rent, or trade your information.

We keep contact messages and supporter records for as long as we have a reason to: an open conversation, an ongoing relationship, or a record we are required to keep as a charity. Newsletter subscriptions are kept until you unsubscribe, and we retain a record of the unsubscribe so that we do not accidentally email you again.

We have not set a fixed number of months or years for every category, and we would rather say so than publish a schedule we do not actually follow. If you want your information removed, ask us and we will do it wherever we are not required to keep it.

The site is served over an encrypted connection. Form submissions are validated and stored on the server rather than in the browser, access to stored messages requires an authenticated staff account, and the keys used by our email and database services are held on the server and are never sent to your browser.

No organization can promise that any system is completely secure, and we will not pretend otherwise. What we can say is that we try to collect as little as possible in the first place, because information we never asked for cannot be lost.

Every newsletter we send includes an unsubscribe link that works immediately and does not require you to sign in or explain yourself.

You can also write to us and ask what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it. We will handle the request as a matter of respect rather than as a legal formality. We have not made a formal determination that we are subject to the GDPR, the CCPA, or similar regimes, so this policy does not claim compliance with them.

We link to giving platforms and, from time to time, to other organizations. Once you follow a link you are on someone else’s site, under their policies. A link is not an endorsement of everything on the site it points to.

This website is written for adults. It is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from a child. If you believe a child has sent us information through this site, contact us and we will remove it.

Our care for the children we serve in Uganda is a separate matter, and a serious one. How we speak about them and photograph them is described on our child safeguarding and dignity page.

When the site changes, this page changes with it. The date at the top of the page is the date of the most recent revision. This policy has been written to describe what the website actually does; it has not yet been reviewed by an attorney.

Questions about this policy, or about information you have already sent us, can go to contact@livingspringsglobal.org or through the contact page.