Privacy Policy

Effective Date: November 1, 2004

The Hillsborough Education Foundation (HEF) is committed to preserving your privacy and safeguarding your personal, financial and other sensitive information. The following statement describes the general information gathering and usage practices of our programs and web site.

Collecting personal information through our on-line service:
When you make a donation to HEF on-line, HEF collects a variety of personal information about you in order to properly process your donation. This personal information may include: name, address, phone, email address, your credit card information, “acknowledgment” or “in memory of” information, and donation amount. It is unlikely that HEF will need to contact you but we reserve the right in the event that we need to verify your personal information. If you contact us by email or phone, we may ask you to verify your personal information so that we may respond to your inquiry.

We collect credit card information so that we can process donations if you elect to give through your credit card. We maintain this information on our secure servers for our internal processes only. We also use a credit card processing company to process donations and monthly fees. This company does not retain, share, store or use personally identifiable information for any secondary purposes.

Protecting personal information:
HEF respects the fact that providing information to HEF does not mean that the information should be forwarded to any other organizations. Personal information is never sold nor shared with outside sources.

HEF takes every precaution to protect donor information. When donors submit sensitive information, their information is protected both online and off-line. When a form asks donors to enter sensitive information (such as credit card number or address), that information is encrypted and is protected with the best encryption software in the industry – SSL. While on a secure page, such as a donation form, the lock icon on the bottom of Web browsers such as Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer becomes locked.

While we use SSL encryption to protect sensitive information online, we also do everything in our power to protect donor information off-line. All of our donor information, not just the sensitive information mentioned above, is restricted in our offices. Only employees who need the information to perform a specific job are granted access to personally identifiable information. All employees are kept up-to-date on our security and privacy practices.

Our monthly e-Newsletter:
HEF offers its own free monthly e-Newsletter that it sends out to interested individuals. Subscribers may choose to unsubscribe at any time and unsubscribe information is located at the bottom of each e-Newsletter.

Complying with the judicial or legal system:
Though HEF makes every effort to preserve donor and customer privacy, we may need to disclose personal information when required by law wherein we have a good-faith belief that such action is necessary to comply with a current judicial proceeding, a court order or legal process served on our organization.

Changes to our privacy policy:
If we decide to change our privacy policy, we will post those changes to our homepage, this privacy statement, and other places we deem appropriate so our donors and customers are always aware of what information we collect, how we use it, and under what circumstances, if any, we disclose it. If, however, we are going to use users’ personally identifiable information in a manner different from that stated at the time of collection we will notify users via email.