Our Approach to Privacy
The Dollar Scholars Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to expanding financial literacy and educational opportunity. We believe you should be able to learn from our resources without being tracked, profiled, or marketed to.
This policy explains what we collect, what we deliberately do not collect, and how to reach us with questions. It applies to the websites, educational resources, and digital services we own and operate.
Information You Choose to Give Us
You can browse and read everything on this website without giving us any personal information. Apart from the short-lived server logs described under How Long We Keep Information, we only receive personal information when you deliberately send it to us.
Newsletter sign-up
If you sign up for our newsletter, we store the name and email address you enter so we can send you the updates you asked for. Providing a middle name or second last name is optional.
We first send one email asking you to confirm your address. Until you confirm it, we do not send you anything else.
Once you confirm, we send one email to say you are subscribed. That email, and every newsletter after it, has a link to unsubscribe. You can also unsubscribe with the form on this page.
Volunteering
If you apply to volunteer with us, or a coordinator invites you, we keep a volunteer record for you. It holds your name, email address and phone number; what you tell us when you apply and on your profile, such as your experience, the languages you speak, when you are free and where you are based; and, once you volunteer, the time you log, what you did and which class or event.
We use it to consider your application, coordinate volunteering, approve and total your hours, and report on our work as a non-profit. Only you and our volunteer coordinators can see it. We keep only a scrambled form of your password, which cannot be turned back into it, so nobody at Dollar Scholars can see it. Volunteers must be 18 or older.
We email you to confirm your address, if someone applies again with your address, when you ask for a new password, and every 3 years after you stop volunteering, to remind you that we still keep your record. Each reminder has a button that erases your record and a link that stops the reminders.
If you translate the website for us, the translations you review are marked with your volunteer ID, such as DS-K7Q4-M9XJ, never your name. They keep that ID after you stop volunteering, even if your record is erased, so we can tell which translations a person has checked.
The portal also keeps a history of what was done in it and when, such as an application accepted or an hour approved. The history holds volunteer IDs, never names or anything you wrote, and it stays after a record is erased.
To stop people guessing passwords or sending floods of applications, the portal counts attempts from each internet connection and to each email address. The counts hold your connection's internet address and a scrambled form of the email address, and are deleted after at most a day.
Volunteer records are kept in a database of their own, apart from the rest of the website, and staff who look after the website cannot see them from its admin pages.
Messages you send us
If you email us about accessibility, volunteering, partnerships, or anything else, we keep your message and contact details so we can reply and follow up.
How We Use Your Information
We use the information you give us only for the purpose you gave it to us for:
- Sending the newsletter and program updates you subscribed to.
- Running the volunteer portal: considering applications, coordinating volunteers, and approving and totalling their hours.
- Responding to questions, feedback, and accommodation requests.
- Coordinating volunteering, teaching, and partnership inquiries.
- Meeting our legal, accounting, and reporting obligations as a non-profit.
Why we are allowed to use it
Data protection laws such as the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) ask us to say why we are allowed to use each kind of information:
- Newsletter: your consent, which you give when you confirm your address. You can withdraw it at any time by unsubscribing.
- Volunteer applications and records: to take the steps you ask for when you apply, and our legitimate interest in organizing volunteers and reporting their hours.
- Messages you send us: our legitimate interest in answering you.
- Server logs and sign-in attempt records: our legitimate interest in keeping the website secure.
- Records we must keep as a non-profit: our legal obligations.
Cookies and Local Storage
Our website uses a small number of strictly functional cookies and browser storage entries. They keep the site working and remember your preferences. None of them track you across other websites.
Cookies are sent to our server with each page you open. Browser storage stays on your device and is read only by the page itself. Staff who sign in to our admin pages also get a sessionid cookie that keeps them signed in for up to two weeks. The financial literacy quiz may set its own short-lived cookie so you can return to a quiz you started.
You can clear or block these at any time through your browser settings. Some parts of the site may not remember your preferences if you do.
Who We Share Information With
We do not share your personal information with anyone except where it is necessary to operate the organization. That may include service providers who host our website or deliver our email, and who are permitted to use the information only to provide that service. We may also disclose information where the law requires it.
The service providers that handle personal information for us are:
- Microsoft, which runs the server that hosts this website, its databases and their backups (Microsoft Azure), and delivers our email (Microsoft 365).
- Cloudflare, whose Turnstile check on our financial literacy quiz helps stop automated spam. It sees your IP address and basic information about your browser, and does not use it for advertising.
Each of them is bound by a data processing agreement and may use the information only to provide its service to us.
Where your information is stored
We are based in the United States, and our website, email and backups are stored and processed there. If you are in the European Union, the United Kingdom or Switzerland, this means your information is transferred to the United States. Microsoft and Cloudflare take part in the EU-US Data Privacy Framework (and its UK and Swiss extensions), and their agreements with us include the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses. You can contact us for more information about these safeguards.
We do not share or sell volunteer records. Only the volunteer and our volunteer coordinators can see them.
Third-Party Content
Our websites may link to or embed content from third-party platforms, including social media networks, video hosting services, and virtual meeting platforms. Those services have their own privacy practices, which we do not control. We encourage you to review their policies before using them.
A few parts of this website load files from other services, which then see your IP address, as any website you connect to does. The map on our Where We Work page loads its map images from OpenFreeMap (openfreemap.org), which says it does not use cookies or track visitors. Some animations load from unpkg.com, a public service for website code. Donations are handled by PayPal on its own website, under its own privacy policy.
Children and Privacy
Our educational programs serve learners of many ages, including students. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children through this website, and our newsletter is intended for adults. If you believe a child has given us personal information, please contact us and we will delete it.
How Long We Keep Information
We keep newsletter subscriptions until you unsubscribe. When you do, we delete your name and email address from the list straight away. We keep correspondence for as long as needed to handle your request and meet our record-keeping obligations. We delete information we no longer need.
Like almost every website, our web server records each request it receives in its logs: the internet address it came from, the page asked for, the time and the name of the browser. We use these logs only to keep the site secure and working, for example to block attacks, and they are deleted after 7 days. We may change this period at any time and for any reason. We will not notify visitors separately when we do; the period in this policy, as last updated, is the one that applies.
When someone tries to sign in to our admin pages, which only our staff use, we record the internet address, the browser's name, the username tried and the time, so we can block password guessing. We delete these records after 30 days.
If we do not go ahead with a volunteer application, we delete it 180 days after we decide, and an application we have not decided on within 180 days of arriving is deleted then. Otherwise we keep a volunteer's record after they stop volunteering, and email them 3 years after they stop, and every 3 years after that, with a button that erases it, unless they have stopped the reminders. When a record is erased, the name and details go, and the hours stay in our totals without the name. We erase a record within 30 days of being asked.
Your Choices and Rights
You are in control of the information you have given us. At any time you may:
- Unsubscribe from the newsletter using the link in any newsletter email, or the form below.
- As a volunteer, see and download your record at any time in the volunteer portal, change your profile there, and ask a coordinator to correct anything else.
- Ask us to erase your volunteer record. We do it within 30 days. If you cannot sign in, write to volunteer@dollarscholars.org to see or erase it.
- Stop the reminders we send volunteers who have left, using the link in any reminder, or erase your volunteer record with its button.
- Ask us what information we hold about you.
- Ask us to correct information that is wrong or out of date.
- Ask us to delete your information.
- Ask for a copy of the information you gave us, in a common format you can take elsewhere.
- Object to our using your information, or ask us to limit how we use it while a question about it is settled.
- Withdraw your consent where we rely on it. This does not affect what we did before you withdrew it.
Depending on where you live, you may have additional rights under local data protection law. We honor these requests regardless of where you live.
If you live in the European Union, the United Kingdom or another place with a data protection authority, you have the right to complain to it. We would be grateful if you contacted us first so we can try to put things right.
Unsubscribe
To stop getting the newsletter, enter your email address. If it is on our list, we will email you a link that unsubscribes it. We send the link rather than unsubscribing straight away, so nobody can unsubscribe someone else.
Volunteers who have left can stop our reminders with the link in any reminder, or by writing to volunteer@dollarscholars.org.
Changes to This Policy
We may update this policy as our programs and services change. When we do, we will revise the date at the top of this page. Significant changes will be announced on our website.
Contact Us
If you have questions about this policy, or would like to exercise any of the choices described above, please contact us.
The Dollar Scholars Foundation is responsible for the personal information described in this policy (in GDPR terms, it is the "controller").
Email: privacy@dollarscholars.org
Mail: Dollar Scholars Foundation, 3060 Williams Drive, Suite 300, Fairfax, VA 22031, USA
Volunteer records: volunteer@dollarscholars.org
We respond to privacy requests within one month.