Privacy Policy

This privacy policy explains how Cooperative for Education (CoEd) and its partner entities—the Guatemala Literacy Project (GLP) and Canadian Friends of Cooperative for Education—collect, use, and protect any information that you provide to CoEd, the GLP, and Canadian Friends when you use these entities’ websites or interact with them via email, phone, mail, or in person. Henceforth, “CoEd” will be used on this page to refer to all three entities.

CoEd is committed to ensuring that your privacy is protected. This notice explains our online and offline information practices and the choices you can make about the way your information is collected and used. To make this notice easy to find, we make it available from the footer on every page of our website. CoEd may update this Policy from time to time by updating this page, so please check this page occasionally to ensure that you’re happy with any changes.

Any questions regarding this Policy and our privacy practices should be sent by email to info@coeduc.org or by calling us at (513) 661-7000.

How do we collect information from you?

We obtain information about you when you use our website, for example, to make a donation, to register for a tour, to contact us with questions, or to sign up to receive emails from us. We also obtain information in other communications, such as when you interact with one of our e-newsletters or communicate with us one-on-one.

In addition, we use Google Analytics to optimize our website. This tool does not require our site visitors to identify themselves, and does not provide us any personally identifiable information about our visitors that is not supplied voluntarily. Our goal in using Analytics is to understand what parts of our website are most useful and which parts need work.

What type of information is collected?

We may collect the following information:

  • Name
  • Contact information including email address, phone, and mailing address
  • Job title & company
  • Demographic information such as birthday, family size, preferences, interests, charitable giving, etc.
  • User behavior and statistics in regards to our website and emails, including but not limited to aggregated, de-identified data analyzed through services such as Google Analytics
  • If you register for a tour, we collect additional information such as passport information, trip preferences, emergency contact details, and relevant medical information.
  • If you make a donation, we collect relevant payment and billing information to process your payment.

How is the information used?

We require this information to understand your needs and provide you with better service. We may use your information:

  • To process your donation or registration to participate in one of our tours
  • To improve our communications with you
  • To send emails with updates on what you’re accomplishing in Guatemala and information about giving opportunities
  • From time to time, we may also use your information to contact you via email, phone, or mail to get your feedback on our work and other relevant topics.
  • To take note of your interests and preferences so that we can contact you with information relevant to you.
  • For internal record keeping in our donor data management software and other internal file storage systems
  • For wealth screening, historical analysis of giving trends, and other organization performance analyses
  • As required in requests for funding and financial audits

How long is your information retained?

Relevant data will be retained for the duration of your involvement with CoEd and archived for statistical purposes following your last interaction with CoEd. You may ask for your data to be removed at any time (with the exception of data that we are legally required to retain for financial auditing purposes) by contacting us at info@coeduc.org or (513) 661-7000.

Who has access to your information?

Protecting your privacy is important to us. Our donor list is not for sale or trade. Your name, mailing information, email address, or any other personal information will not be sold, shared, nor given to other persons or organizations for their own direct marketing purposes. We do not send donor mailings on behalf of other organizations. All employees and volunteers who may work with your information agree to abide by CoEd policies in regards to such information.

Third Party Service Providers working on our behalf: We may pass your information to our third party service providers, subcontractors, and other associated organizations for the purposes of completing tasks and providing services to you on our behalf (for example to process donations and send you mailings). However, when we use third party service providers, we disclose only the personal information that is necessary to deliver the service. Please be reassured that we will not release your information to third parties beyond the CoEd network unless we are required to do so by law, for example, by a court order or for the purposes of prevention of fraud or other crime.

When you are using our secure online donation pages, your donation is processed by a third party payment processor that specializes in the secure online capture and processing of credit/debit card transactions. If you have any questions regarding secure transactions, please contact us.

How is your information secured?

When you give us personal information, we take steps to ensure that it’s treated securely. Sensitive payment information (such as credit or debit card details) is handled through our secure payment processing service. We take every effort to secure additional, less sensitive details (your email address, etc.) provided through our website through the use of SSL Certificates. When you are on a page protected by SSL, a lock icon will appear next to the page address in web browsers such as Firefox and Chrome. However, the transmission of data over the Internet can never be guaranteed to be 100% secure. As a result, while we strive to protect your personal information, we cannot guarantee the security of any information you transmit to us, and you do so at your own risk. Once we receive your information, we make our best effort to ensure its security in our systems, including password protection for all of our data storage services and staff computers. Where we have given (or where you have chosen) a password which enables you to access certain parts of our websites, you are responsible for keeping this password confidential. We ask you not to share your password with anyone.

Controlling your personal information

If you wish to opt out of receiving marketing emails, update your information, or request that you be removed from our system, please contact us at info@coeduc.org or (513) 661-7000.

Links to other websites

Our website may contain links to other websites run by other organizations. This privacy policy applies only to our website‚ so we encourage you to read the privacy statements on the other websites you visit. We cannot be responsible for the privacy policies and practices of other sites even if you access them using links from our website.

In addition, if you linked to our website from a third party site, we cannot be responsible for the privacy policies and practices of the owners and operators of that third party site and recommend that you check the policy of that third party site.

Our commitment to children’s privacy

We are especially concerned with protecting the privacy of persons under age 18. If you are under age 18‚ please get your parent/guardian’s permission beforehand whenever you provide us with personal information. Furthermore, we never collect or maintain information at our website from those we actually know are under 13, and no part of our website is structured to attract anyone under 13.

Review of this Policy

We keep this Policy under regular review. This Policy was last updated and went into effect on May 22, 2018, in efforts to comply with the European Economic Area’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Donor Bill of Rights

Philanthropy is based on voluntary action for the common good. It is a tradition of giving and sharing that is primary to the quality of life. To ensure that philanthropy merits the respect and trust of the general public, and that donors and prospective donors can have full confidence in the nonprofit organizations and causes they are asked to support, we declare that all donors have these rights:

  • To be informed of the organization’s mission, of the way the organization intends to use donated resources, and of its capacity to use donations effectively for their intended purposes.
  • To be informed of the identity of those serving on the organization’s governing board, and to expect the board to exercise prudent judgment in its stewardship responsibilities.
  • To have access to the organization’s most recent financial statements.
  • To be assured their gifts will be used for the purposes for which they were given.
  • To receive appropriate acknowledgement and recognition.
  • To be assured that information about their donation is handled with respect and with confidentiality to the extent provided by law.
  • To expect that all relationships with individuals representing organizations of interest to the donor will be professional in nature.
  • To be informed whether those seeking donations are volunteers, employees of the organization, or hired solicitors.
  • To have the opportunity for their names to be deleted from mailing lists that an organization may intend to share.
  • To feel free to ask questions when making a donation and to receive prompt, truthful, and forthright answers.