1. Summary
This Policy describes how the United Way of Southwestern Pennsylvania (“we” or “us”) collects, uses, and shares your personal information. We understand that online privacy is important, and we are committed to protecting your privacy. Please read this Privacy Policy before using any of the websites operating under the United Way of Southwestern Pennsylvania name (each a “Site,” and together they are the “Sites”). This Privacy Policy applies to all Sites. This Privacy Policy applies only to information collected directly through the Sites and does not address our practices related to information collected from you other than directly through or from the Sites, such as by telephone, email, fax, postal mail, personal delivery or other offline means or media. If you do not consent to these terms, you should not use the Sites or otherwise provide us with any personally identifiable information (as defined below).
When you access or use the Sites, your information, including some personal information, will be collected, transferred, processed, stored and disclosed in accordance with this Privacy Policy. We will not sell, share, rent information collected by the Sites to others, other than as disclosed in this Privacy Policy. We collect information from our users at several different points on our Sites because we believe that knowing more about you will enable us to serve you better by personalizing the content and services we can offer.
This Privacy Policy is part of and incorporated into the Terms of Use governing your use of the Sites. Parts of the Terms of Use affect this Privacy Policy, so unless you have already done so, please review the Terms of Use prior to using the Sites. BY ACCESSING OR REGISTERING FOR AN ACCOUNT WITH ANY OF THE SITES, YOU EXPRESSLY CONSENT TO THE COLLECTION, TRANSFER, USE, PROCESSING AND STORAGE OF YOUR INFORMATION, INCLUDING PERSONAL INFORMATION, AS DESCRIBED IN THIS PRIVACY POLICY. If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy or matters that relate to it, you may contact us at: 412.261.6010 or by sending an email to:
2. Our Information Collection Practices
2.1 General
When you visit the Sites you can browse without submitting any personal information about yourself. However, we may automatically receive and record non-personal information on our server logs from your browser. In some areas of the Sites (for example, if you create an account, donate or sign up to volunteer), we may collect some personally identifiable information from you. “Personally identifiable information” is information that would allow someone to identify or contact you or your computing device, which may include, for example, your name, address, telephone number, email address, payment or identity verification information, gender, age and date of birth. We may collect and store information related to your user profile and usage behavior in order to operate the Sites and enable you to have a personalized experience with the Sites. Such information may include, without limitation, your user name, password, password reminder questions and answers, interests, communication preferences, and any correspondence that you send to us. We collect your age range or birth date to maintain the privacy of those under 13 and to provide us with demographic information about our users, which allows us to better personalize our Sites. In addition, you can choose to supply optional information, including your areas of interest related to your community’s health and human service needs, so that we can help give you the information you desire.
2.2 Automatically Collected Information
Similar to other websites, we may collect some information automatically and store it in log files through the use of “cookies” and other tracking mechanisms. This information is non-personal and does not identify you. The information collected may include, but is not limited to: your IP address, browser type and language, referring and exit pages and URLs, search engine used, other browser history, platform type, number of clicks, landing pages, cookie information, the pages you requested and viewed, the amount of time spent on particular pages, and the date and time of your visit. We collect this non-personally identifiable information in order to help diagnose problems with our servers and to administer the Site. Your IP address is also used to help identify you and to gather broad demographic information. We may also use cookies, Clear GIFs and log file information to: (a) store information so that you will not have to re-enter it during your visit or the next time you visit the Site; (b) monitor aggregate metrics such as total number of visitors, pages viewed, etc.; and (c) track entries, submissions and status in any interactive portions of the Site.
2.3 Cookies
Like most websites, United Way of Southwestern Pennsylvania and our third-party analytics providers use cookies on the Sites. A cookie is a small text file that is stored on a user’s computer for record-keeping purposes. We may use cookies for various purposes, including, without limitation: (a) remembering information so that you will not have to re-enter it during your visit or the next time you visit the Sites; (b) providing custom, personalized content and information; (c) monitoring the effectiveness of the Sites; (d) monitoring aggregate metrics such as total number of visitors and traffic; (e) diagnosing or fixing technology problems reported by our users or engineers that are associated with certain IP addresses; and (f) helping you efficiently access your information after you sign in. Some cookies remain on your computer until you delete them, while others, like session ID cookies, expire when you close your browser. You may set your browser settings to attempt to reject cookies, and you may still use the Sites, but your ability to use some functionality and areas of the Sites may be limited. See Section 4 (Online Tracking and Your Choices) for more information on how the Sites may respond to your browser settings. We do not control the use of cookies by third parties. See Section 2.5 (Third Party Providers) and review the privacy policies of each of the third party advertising and analytics providers for more information on third party cookie. You can find more information about cookies and your ability to control their use at http://www.allaboutcookies.org/ or by reviewing your browser or access device settings. Although such information should be helpful, we do not control or guarantee its accuracy or that it will be effective with respect to all information gathering tools or in all circumstances.
2.4 Web Beacons
Web beacons (sometimes called transparent GIFs, clear GIFs, or web bugs) are small strings of code that provide a way for us to deliver a small (usually invisible) graphic image on a web page or in an email. Web beacons can recognize certain types of information on your computer such as cookies, the time and date a page is viewed, and a description of the page where the web beacon is placed. Unlike cookies, which are stored on a user’s computer hard drive, web beacons are small graphics that are embedded invisibly on web pages or in HTML-based emails. We and our third party providers may place web beacons on our Sites that track what other websites you visit (both before and after visiting a Site), and which features or content on the Site are popular. We use information obtained from web beacons to help us improve our Sites.
2.5 Third Party Providers
We use third party providers, such as Google Analytics, to help us improve the Sites and collect information about the usage and users of our Sites, including demographic and interest-level information. Our analytics providers use cookies and Clear GIFs in order to collect demographic and interest-level information and usage information from users that visit the Sites, including but not limited to information about the pages where users enter and exit the Site and what pages users view and visit on the Sites. Cookies and Clear GIFs allow analytics providers to recognize a user when a user visits the Sites, but also when a user visits other websites. Our analytics providers use the information they collect from the Sites and other websites to profile users in order to share information about users with us and other web site operators. For more information regarding Google’s use of cookies and collection and use of information see the Google Privacy Policy. Google will not associate your IP address with any other data held by Google. The information generated by the cookies and Clear GIFs about your use of the Site (including your IP address) will be transmitted to and stored by Google on servers in the United States. If you would like to opt out of Google Analytics tracking, please download and install the Google Analytics Opt Out Browser Ad-On, which is available at the following link: https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout. We may link information we receive from our analytics partners with other information we have collected through the Site, including personal information. In addition, we may obtain data from third parties who sell consumer data and blend that data with information we have obtained through the Site, from our third party analytics providers, or otherwise. We use the blended information consistently with this Privacy Policy, and generally for our own internal business, marketing and development purposes. By using the Sites, you consent to the processing of data about you by Google in the manner and for the purposes set out above.
2.6 Online Pledges and Campaigns; Volunteering
We request specific, personally identifiable information from donors when they desire to make a charitable donation or pledge online through the Sites. In order to make a contribution, a donor must provide information related to the transaction such as an address for billing and gift acknowledgment, pledge amount, recipient choice information and payment information. We provide agencies with information on the donors that have designated a gift to them. If you choose to donate your time and sign-up online to volunteer, information about demographics, your volunteering areas of interest and contact information will be collected. This information will be used to develop statistics on volunteer activity, for marketing and promotional purposes, to comply with applicable laws related to our volunteer activities (e.g., regarding background checks for volunteers working with children, taxes, etc.), as well as for other general internal purposes.
2.7 Company Campaigns
When a company uses online pledging, we provide online campaign reports to the company to give it the information necessary to properly manage its campaign. A company may request, and we will provide, details about employee gifts from that company. For purposes of completing payroll deduction withholdings, we will provide the company with all relevant and necessary information required for it to establish payroll deduction withholdings in keeping with the donor’s expressed desire to make a gift to us using payroll deduction.
2.8 Social Media, Comments and User Content
Some Sites contain a social media component in which members may share fundraising goals, upload and post user-generated content, connect with other members through blog posts and comments, view activity feeds of actions taken by fellow users, and/or invite others to join them through other social media platforms. In joining those Sites, you will be asked to create an account and your individual member profile page will display your chosen name, a profile picture (should you choose to upload one), photo albums and other content uploaded by you. Information you post on the Site is not private and can be accessed or viewed by other people. Unless you choose to donate anonymously, publicly viewable information (e.g., on an activity feed) may also include the amount that you and your contributors, separately and together, have pledged towards your personal campaign.
Please refer to the Terms of Use for further detail concerning user content and other materials submitted to the Sites. United Way of Southwestern Pennsylvania assumes no liability for the accuracy of user content, no duty to update or correct such information, and no liability for those communications that may arise under copyright, libel, privacy, obscenity or other laws.
3. Our Information Sharing Practices.
We do not sell or rent any of your personal information to third parties for marketing purposes. However, we may disclose your information to an affiliated entity or organization, other United Ways, agents, service providers and recipient organizations indicated in your pledges. For information about the use of information by agents and service providers, see Section 2.5 (Third Party Providers). We reserve the right to disclose all information collected via the Sites, internally or by third parties, for any lawful purpose or to prevent harm to us or others. For example we may disclose your personal information:
- to engage in routine uses that an ordinary and reasonable person should expect in the context of the services that we provide, the reasons for which we collect personal information, and/or the ways that similar entities ordinarily operate, including, for example, disclosures:
- for security, anti-fraud, authentication and verification purposes;
- to respond to questions or requests or to contact you for lawful purposes, including for surveys;
- to vendors and their service providers who reasonably need the personal information to do their jobs, which may include helping us to analyze how the Sites are used, diagnose service or technical problems, customize content or deliver personal communications, and/or protect the security or integrity of the Sites;
- to our affiliated entities who may treat your personal information differently than we would;
- to verify your identity, authority, or other characteristics or information;
- to respond to or participate in disputes (e.g., lawsuits or investigations);
- to persons appearing to have a lawful interest in the personal information (e.g., to an insurance company processing an insurance claim involving you); or
- to comply with applicable law;
- in connection with a merger or other business combination or separation (including, but not limited to, a voluntary or involuntary change in our business or structure, reorganization, sale of all or part of our stock or assets, spinoff, bankruptcy, or dissolution);
- to respond to legal process or regulatory authorities (such as subpoenas, warrants, investigative demands from law enforcement, regulators or others, national or international security letters or demands, etc.), or in order to investigate, prevent, or take action regarding suspected or actual illegal activities;
- to protect against fraud, claims, or other liability or harm to you, us, or others;
- to exercise or perform a legal, ethical, contractual or other right or obligation, including enforcing an agreement you made; or
- for such lawful purposes as may be disclosed or evident at the time that you provide personal information to us (e.g., when you provide personal information in response to a survey, to sign up for an event, or to register for a newsletter).
4. Online Tracking and Your Choices.
As discussed above in the “Our Information Collection Practices” section, we track website usage information through the use of cookies and other tracking mechanisms. Please note that we do not knowingly use personal information collected on our Site through cookies or other similar tools for targeted or behavioral advertising, or knowingly allow third parties to use our Site to do so. If your browser or similar mechanism gives our Site a “do not track” signal, the Site may not honor it to the extent that the Site may use cookies or other tracking tools for the purposes described in this Privacy Policy (“Approved Sharing”). If your settings and our Site are nuanced enough to allow such Approved Sharing but also readily preclude tracking for behavioral advertising by third parties, the Site will make commercially reasonable attempts to honor your settings. However, we do not make any promises or guarantees about the effects of any “Do Not Track” choice that you may make because: such nuanced treatment is not necessarily available or effective for any or all browsers, mechanisms or tracking technologies, and our commercially reasonable attempts to honor your settings might or might not be effective to preclude tracking or behavioral advertising by third parties at all or over any particular period of time; and tracking technologies, browsers, and access devices may change from time to time and our commercially reasonable attempts might or might not be effective for each technology or across all platforms.You may still manage the settings on your browser or mobile device and delete and disable cookies and other tracking or recording tools. Doing so may impact your experience using the Sites and may make certain features and areas unavailable to you. We do not control third party advertising and analytics providers. You should review their privacy policies for information about whether they honor the “Do Not Track” browser signal. For information about opting-out from Google Analytics tracking, review their privacy policy referenced in Section 2.5 (Third Party Providers). Many advertising companies are also members of the NAI or DAA and provide opt outs on those industry pages at www.networkadvertising.org/choices and www.aboutads.info/choices.
5. Information Security Practices.
United Way of Southwestern Pennsylvania uses commercially reasonable efforts to protect our users’ information from loss, misuse, or unauthorized access, disclosure, alteration or destruction. All pledge transactions occur on secure pages of the site using SSL technology, which is the generally accepted standard for secure web transactions. We use a third party payment processor for all pledge transactions, and we do not store any credit card information. However, we cannot guarantee that your personally identifiable information will never be disclosed in ways not otherwise described in this Privacy Policy. For example, we may be required to disclose personal information to the government or third parties under certain circumstances, third parties may unlawfully intercept or access transmissions or private communications, or users may abuse or misuse personal information that they collect from the Sites. No transmission of data over the internet can be 100% secure. WE ACCORDINGLY DO NOT GUARANTEE THE SECURITY OR CONFIDENTIALITY OF PERSONAL INFORMATION AND DISCLAIM ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, DUTIES OR CONDITIONS IN THAT REGARD. If any applicable law imposes on us a duty with respect to these matters that cannot be disclaimed, you acknowledge and agree that our commercially reasonable precautions shall be considered to be satisfy that duty unless (and only unless) we have engaged in willful misconduct.
Please also note that you have a role in the security of your personal information. For example, you should not provide us with personal information that we do not request, you are responsible for controlling access to any personal computing device through which your personal information may be stored or accessed, and you are responsible for safeguarding any passwords or other log-in credentials to may be used to access to your personal information.
6. Opt-Out Right and Accessing and Updating Your Information.
6.1 Opt-Out Right
Except as noted in this Privacy Policy or as necessary for us to provide the services, information or products that you request, you may opt-out of having your personally identifiable information (that has been voluntarily provided to us through the use of a Site) retained by us, used by us for secondary purposes, or disclosed by us to third parties. This right does not apply to·the collection of non-personal information that we collect automatically (see Sections 2.2 (Automatically Collected Information) and 2.3 (Cookies)).
6.2 Information Accuracy
We intend for the personally identifiable information that we collect to be reliable, accurate, complete and current. If we discover that corrections are necessary with respect to any such information, we will update our records.
If your personal information changes or if you would like to cancel your Site account (for example, your account as described in Section 2.8), you may make those changes by contacting us as described in Section 1. We will honor requests submitted through other means if required by law or if we determine in our sole discretion to do so.
Requests to access, change, or delete your information generally will be handled within 30 days, but we reserve the right to deny your request, subject to applicable law. For example, we may deny a request to access personal information where the burden or expense of providing access would be disproportionate to the risks to your privacy, or where such access would compromise the rights of other persons.
We may respond to a request to access personal information by supplying a copy of or access to the relevant personal information within a reasonable time. As a general matter, this means that we will respond in no less time than is needed by us or our service providers to retrieve that information from our systems or records in the ordinary course of business.
We also may keep a record of changes or deletions and use or disclose that record for lawful purposes. If you ask us to delete personal information, the information may be immediately deleted. However, if technical constraints prevent us from easily doing so, we instead may take reasonable measures to prevent internal or external access to such information until it is deleted from our systems or records (such as by being overwritten).
Subject to any legal right that you may have to require us to delete your personal information (e.g., if you terminate your account), we may keep personal information for as long as necessary for our legal needs, and we reserve the right to retain it to the fullest extent required or permitted by law. Note, however, that you should retain your own records, because we also may delete personal information in our discretion at any time, subject to applicable law.
We do not charge for responding to requests to access, change, or delete personal information. If we have a duty to require third parties to delete or cease using personal information, we may satisfy that duty by sending them notice to do so without further action on our part (except as expressly required by law).
6.3 Protecting the Privacy of Children Under 13
As a general rule, United Way of Southwestern Pennsylvania does not collect information from anyone under the age of 13 and we will not accept registrations by people under that age. However, because we cannot ensure that our visitors will enter their registration information truthfully, we cannot reasonably stop all children under 13 from using our services. To use or provide personally identifiable information through the Sites you must be at least eighteen (18) years of age. If you are under 18, please do not send any information about yourself to us, including your name, address, telephone number or email address. If we learn that we have collected personal information from a person under age 18, we will delete that information promptly. If you believe that we might have any information from or about a person under the age of 18, please contact us as described in Section 1.
7. Links to Other Websites.
The Sites contain links to other websites. Please be aware that we are not responsible for the privacy practices, terms of use or content of other websites. We encourage our users to be aware when they leave our Sites and to read the privacy statements of each and every website that collects personally identifiable information. This Privacy Policy applies solely to information collected by the Sites, and the data collection practices of any linked websites will be governed by that website’s own privacy policy.
8. Mobile Devices.
Certain mobile devices contain unique identifiers that can be used, for example, to identify the physical location of such devices. Mobile devices also typically transmit caller ID data when used to transmit a telephone call or text message. The Sites may collect, use, transmit, process and maintain unique identifiers, caller ID data, location-based data, and similar information when you rely on mobile devices. The Sites also may require collection of your mobile phone number in order for you to participate in certain features and that number may be associated with such information.
When you first launch any of our mobile applications, you may be asked to consent to the application’s collection of location information. If you consent, information regarding your location may be transmitted to us and/or to third parties in order to provide services to you. In some circumstances, we may not be able to provide our Sites without this location information, which means that you may not be able to use our Sites if you do not provide your consent.
If you initially consent to our collection of location information and change your mind, you can revoke your consent by changing the preferences on your mobile device. You also may stop our collection of location information by following the standard uninstall process to remove all United Way applications from your device.
9. Communication Preferences.
We may provide notifications to you that are required by law or that are for marketing or other purposes. Subject to applicable law, we may provide such notifications to you via email, hard copy, or through conspicuous posting on the Sites or the software on your mobile device. We reserve the right to determine the form and means of providing notifications to you.
In addition, you can opt-out from receiving commercial or solicitation emails by emailing us at or by clicking on the “unsubscribe” link located on the bottom of our commercial emails.
10. Changes and Updates.
From time to time we may change our policies and procedures with respect to the use and disclosure of personal information. You agree that, subject to applicable law, we may revise, supplement, or replace this Privacy Policy from time to time. We will post notifications of revised versions of this Privacy Policy on the Sites and/or in our software, as applicable, at least thirty calendar days before the changes take effect. When the Privacy Policy changes, we will post the substitute version and change the effective date listed at the beginning of the Privacy Policy. To the extent not prohibited by law, any amendment or update to this Privacy Policy will apply to personal information that we already have collected and to any personal information that we may subsequently obtain.
When required by applicable law, however, we may provide you with greater advance notice of any changes to this Privacy Policy and/or with an opportunity to object to such changes. If you exercise your right to object, the changes will not become effective with respect to your information, but your ability to use the Sites may be terminated or impaired. We will explicitly notify you of the consequences of objection or non-objection to the extent and in the manner required by law.
We encourage you to review this Privacy Policy whenever you use our Sites in order to stay informed about our information practices.