Privacy statement

Our commitment

Children Believe recognizes the importance of privacy. Whereas Canadian privacy laws and Internet anti-spam laws, as laid out in the Personal Information and Electronic Document Act (PIPEDA) and Fighting Internet and Wireless Spam Act (FISA – Bill C-28) are not applicable to not-for-profit organizations such as Children Believe, we’re committed to maintaining the accuracy, confidentiality and security of your personal information and the personal information of children we’re working to help. Personal information means information about an identifiable individual.

How do we use, access, disclose and protect your personal information?

During the course of our various activities, we gather and use personal information. The personal information we collect is required to link a donor with a child, to process payments and post a receipt, send new or updated child information to the donor, to service donors’ accounts and to keep donors informed of Children Believe activities in the field.

You will not receive marketing email messages from Children Believe unless you have consented to receive them. If at any time you decide you do not want to receive marketing emails from us simply let us know, and we’ll remove your name and email address from our marketing list. We’ll do the same with your mailing address, and telephone number, on request.

If your information has changed, please contact us so we can keep you informed and connected.

Children Believe endeavours to maintain appropriate physical, procedural and technical safeguards with respect to the personal information stored in its information systems and information storage facilities so as to prevent any loss, misuse, unauthorized access, disclosure or modification of personal information.

We will not share, sell, trade or distribute your personal information to a third party for their marketing purposes.

Website and electronic commerce

Children Believe understands your online giving experience should be easy and, most importantly, safe. We use password protocols and encryption software to protect personal and other information collected when a service is provided online. Children Believe routinely updates the software to protect such information. As technology changes, Children Believe upgrades its systems accordingly.

If you feel more comfortable making a donation offline, or have questions or concerns related to childrenbelieve.ca, please call 1.800.263.5437 and speak with a donor-relations associate.

Collection of non-personal information

To improve our services online, Children Believe may collect non-personal/general information such as:

the Internet domain for your Internet service provider, such as “company.com” or “service.ca” and the IP address of the computer accessing the website, such as “ppp-55”
the type of browser or operating system you’re using
the date and time of your visit to our site, along with the address of the previous website you were visiting, and if you linked to us from another site

This tracking system doesn’t record personal information about individuals or link this information to any personal data collected. It’s used to help us make our site more useful to visitors. We may disclose this non-personal information to third parties such as donors, clients or advertisers and/or use it for auditing purposes as we work to improve our services.

We may use “cookies” that identify you as a return visitor. A cookie is a piece of data that a website can send to your browser, which may then store the cookie on your hard drive. So, when you come back to visit us again, we can tailor information to suit your individual preferences. The goal is to save you time, provide you with a more meaningful visit and to measure website activity. Cookies don’t contain any personally identifying information. Browsers allow you to disable cookie collection if you wish or inform you when a cookie is being stored on your hard drive.

Sharing your donor experience through social media

To protect the safety of sponsored children, we ask you to take the following precautions when posting information and communicating on social-networking sites about your donor experience:

please only use the first name of your sponsored child
please don’t post your sponsored child’s ID number
please ensure the photos you post are appropriate and that your sponsored child is adequately clothed
please don’t publish identifying information about the child (e.g. the name of the location where he or she lives, the school he/she attends)
photos shouldn’t identify the location taken

We appreciate your support and understanding in protecting the safety of your sponsored child.