Privacy Policy

Last Updated:  November 12, 2013

The Sheckler Foundation, a non-profit corporation (sometimes referred to in this website as “TSF,” “we” or “us”), created this Privacy Policy to share with each of our website visitors (sometimes referred to in this website as “you”) how we respect your concerns about privacy and value our relationship with you.  This Privacy Policy describes the types of personal information we collect, how we may use that information and with which parties we may share it.  Our Privacy Policy also describes the measures we take to protect the security of the information.  Additionally, we tell you how you can reach us to update your contact information, remove your name from our mailing lists or answer any questions you may have about our privacy practices.  We do share some information as mentioned below.  This Privacy Policy may be changed or updated from time to time.  By visiting TSF at www.shecklerfoundation.org, you accept the practices described in this Privacy Policy.  This Privacy Policy is part of and hereby incorporated into our Terms of Use and all other terms and conditions of using our website, as stated on or through our website or via e-mail, from time to time.

WEBSITE ACCESS OR USE:  By your accessing or using the TSF website, you have agreed to:  (1) act in accordance with the practices described in this Privacy Policy, which we may change from time to time, and; (2) the transfer, processing and maintenance of your personal and sensitive information that you have provided to TSF.

THE PERSONAL INFORMATION WE COLLECT AND HOW WE USE IT:  Depending on the type of communication or transaction, the personal information we collect may include, but is not limited to, your name, organization name, street address, zip code, telephone number, fax number, e-mail address, credit card information, bank information and billing information.  Here are the main things for which we collect your information:

Donations, Shopping, Events:  When you make a donation to TSF, bid for or place an order for one of our auction, sale or gift items, or sign up for a TSF event through our website, we may ask you to submit certain personal information (such as, but not limited to, credit card information and date of birth) so we can process your transaction.  We use the credit card information you provide to fulfill the transaction you requested.  We may maintain that information in our customer service records in case you choose to make any future donations, purchases or event sign-ups.  We also may maintain your contact information in our records so we can contact you to provide TSF program information and details about additional giving opportunities.

Registration, Newsletter, Social Media:  When you register on our website, subscribe to our newsletter or follow us, share with us or otherwise interact with TSF through social media via the internet (for example, on or through Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or our RSS feed, etc.), we may use the information you provide to communicate with you or other followers, inform you of promotions and otherwise enhance and maintain our social media relationship with you.

Contests and Games:  Our site may contain notices of contests or games we are conducting (for example, our recurring “Be The Change” challenge), which you may enter electronically, in most cases.  We use the information you provide to conduct the contest or game (for example, to contact you if you are a winner, to announce the winner or to alert you to the chance to enter the next challenge, etc.).  We will not use the information you provided to enter the contest or game for any other purpose unless you have agreed otherwise.

Questionnaires and Surveys:  We occasionally may ask our website visitors to complete online surveys and opinion questionnaires about their activities, opinions and interests.  These surveys help us understand the needs of our amazing community of support.  We do not keep any personal information about you in connection with your participation in a website questionnaire or survey unless you specifically agree to provide it.

Aggregate Information:  We may collect general, non-personal statistical information about the use of the website, such as how many visitors visit a specific page on the website, how long they stay on that page and which hyperlinks, if any, they click on.  This information represents a generic overview of our users, including, but not limited to, their collective viewing habits, and allows us and third parties to modify information, promotions, offers and/or discounts on services and products based on user traffic and behavior.  We may collect this information through the use of technologies such as “cookies” and tracer tags, which are discussed in greater detail below.  This information is collected in order to help enhance the website to make for a better visitor experience.

Third Party Information:  We may supplement information that you provide to us with information from other sources, such as information to validate or update your address, payment card or other demographic and lifestyle information.  We use this information to help us maintain the accuracy of the information we collect, to enable us to fulfill our services, products and activities, to target our communications so that we can inform you of promotions, community support activities, services, products and offers that may be of interest and for internal business analysis or other business purposes consistent with our mission.

Contact TSF:  You may choose to contact us through our website.  We provide online forms so you may, for example, (1) ask a question, (2) update your contact information, (3) request more information about TSF or (4) contact us for a news or publicity matter, etc.  We use the information you provide on these forms to fulfill your request and to respond to your inquiries whenever reasonably possible.

WE DO NOT KNOWINGLY COLLECT INFORMATION FROM CHILDREN:  TSF welcomes people of all ages to learn more about our organization and explore opportunities to serve their communities through TSF’s activities and networks.  However, we encourage children to do this only with parental knowledge and supervision.  Although we may not be legally restricted, we do not, either directly or through some other party or service, knowingly collect or solicit personal information from anyone under the age of 13 or knowingly allow such persons to provide us with their personal information without parent or guardian consent.  If you are under 13, do not send any information about yourself to us, including your name, street address, telephone number or e-mail address, etc., unless you have your parent’s or guardian’s permission.  If we learn that we collected personal information from anyone under 13 years of age and do not have a parent’s or guardian’s consent, we may delete that information.  If you believe that we might have any sensitive information from or about anyone under the age of 13, please contact us via e-mail at info@shecklerfoundation.org or by telephone Monday through Friday, 9:00AM - 5:00PM Pacific Time, at (949) 542-3079.

SECURITY OF SENSITIVE INFORMATION:  We use a variety of protections to safeguard the security of your credit card transactions.  We use technologies, processes and administrative policies such as encryption, access controls, network firewalls and other protocols.  These measures make it extremely difficult for anyone to intercept the credit card information you send to us.  We maintain technical and administrative safeguards to protect against unauthorized disclosure, use, alteration or destruction of any of your personal information in our possession.  When you provide credit card information to make a donation or purchase, we use the Secure Socket Layer (“SSL”) technology to help protect the information you provide.  SSL is the internet industry’s standard for securing transactions.  It is an encryption standard that scrambles data as it travels from your computer to the servers of third-party payment companies, and your payment information is only to be accessible by those authorized with special access rights to such systems and who are required to keep the information confidential.  Those companies also use encryption and additional security measures.  After a payment transaction with TSF, your credit card information is not stored on TSF’s servers or in our files.  As you can see, we are truly committed to guarding your sensitive information, but please note that perfect security does not exist on the internet.  You can see that you are in an extra secure area of our website if a “lock” icon appears on your screen and the “http” portion of our URL internet address changes to “https.”  The “s” means “secure.”

TSF MAY SHARE YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION:  If you provide TSF with personal information when you visit our website, we may use the information in our programs and activities.  Personal information will be shared internally at TSF to complete your donations and purchasing and event transactions, to contact you about our on-going work, news and social media activities, to assist with and respond to your involvement in contests and games, to offer you a chance to give feedback via questionnaires, surveys, e-mails and other means of telecommunication and to discuss ways that you can further support our efforts to help those in need.  TSF will not sell, rent, trade, or otherwise disclose your personal information with any third party, except as mentioned in this Privacy Policy.  TSF reserves the right to share your personal information in certain situations, including:

Credit Card Transactions, Electronic Fund Transfers, Payments by Check or Money Order and Other On-line Transactions:  TSF hires third parties to provide credit card, bank, payment and information processing services and order fulfillment services.  If you choose to make a donation, buy a product or service or sign up for an event on-line, by phone, through the mail or by other means, we will share your personal information with our processing service providers.  These service providers are not authorized by us to use or disclose the information except as necessary to perform services or deliver goods on our behalf or to comply with legal requirements.  We make an effort to require all third-party service providers to hold personal information in strict confidence.  While we, like so many other companies, believe these other service companies are trustworthy and will treat your personal information responsibly, we do not own or control them and cannot and do not guarantee your privacy when fulfilling a transaction through them.

Necessity:  If we have reason to believe that there has been some interference with or inappropriate use of our website, communications, charitable services or personal or real property by you or your employees, agents, contractors or affiliates (collectively, “Related Parties”), or if we have reason to believe that one of the TSF website users, donors, employees or other Related Parties may have suffered an injury or loss or may have harmed some other party, we will disclose, without notice to you, personal information as we deem appropriate or (1) if we are required to do so by law, (2) in response to a request from law enforcement authorities or other government officials or (3) when we believe disclosure is necessary or appropriate to prevent further harm or loss or in connection with an investigation of suspected or actual illegal activity.

Merger, Acquisition or other Business Restructuring:  We also may transfer your personal information to a third party successor or assignee of TSF if we are involved in an acquisition, merger or other transfer of control or sale of our business or assets.  Should such a sale or other such transfer occur, we will use reasonable efforts to try to direct the transferee to use personal information you have provided through this website in a manner that is consistent with this Privacy Policy.

Authorized by You, Publicly Available and Third-Party Administration:  TSF may transfer your personal information if authorized by you, or if the information is already publicly available or if the disclosure is to outside businesses to perform certain services for us, such as maintaining our website or mailing lists, processing orders, delivering services and products, sending postal mail, processing claims for lost or stolen certificates, providing marketing assistance and data analysis, etc.

If TSF becomes aware that any third-party business or contractor described above is improperly using or disclosing your personal information, TSF will notify that outside party and request that it take reasonable steps to cease such use or disclosure promptly.

YOU MAY CHANGE YOUR PRIVACY PREFERENCES:  If you would like to change your privacy preferences, update your contact information or prefer not to receive certain communications from us (such as e-mail), please e-mail us at info@shecklerfoundation.org or call us Monday through Friday, 9:00AM - 5:00PM Pacific Time, at (949) 542-3079.  Please note that, if at any time you would like to unsubscribe from receiving future e-mails from TSF, we generally include unsubscribe instructions at the bottom of e-mails we send out.

COOKIES AND OTHER TRACERS:  When you visit our website, your browser automatically sends us certain internet information (such as the Internet Protocol (IP) address of your computer).  We also may use cookies and other tracing technology to better understand how visitors use our site.  A “cookie” is a small piece of data that is sent to your browser from TSF’s web server and is stored on your computer’s hard drive.  Cookies are used to collect non-identifying information about the visitor, such as internet surfing behavior, user preferences for a particular website, etc.  TSF may use two different types of cookies—session-based cookies and persistent cookies.  Session-based cookies expire at the end of a browser session, which means that, once you close your browser, the cookie ends.  Persistent cookies remain on your computer until you remove them.  Persistent cookies are used to provide internal website measurements.  You can manually delete all cookies, including persistent cookies, within your browser privacy settings.  Without cookies, however, you may not be able to take full advantage of all of TSF’s website features.  Our website may also use technology called “tracer tags,” which are variously described as “pixels”, “clear GIFs” and “web beacons”.  These technologies allow us to understand, for example, which pages you visit on our website and other ways you interact with our website, such as the frequency of your comments posted or the frequency of donations made through the website, etc.  We may use cookies and tracer tags to gather aggregate data that can lead to website improvements, to enhance the online experience of our visitors, to help manage online advertising in connection with our website and to better understand how our site is used.  Cookies and tracer tags may tell us, for example, whether you have visited our site before or whether you are a new visitor, etc.  We may link the information we record using tracking technologies to personal information we collect.

PARTNER WEBSITE LINKS:  In order for The Sheckler Foundation to survive, we depend on the mutual support and promotion of generous third-party organizations, companies, individuals and other such “partners” who are similarly committed to our community and our causes.  We also find it helpful to TSF and our community and visitors to share information about select recipients and other “beneficiaries” of our donations, investments and the like.  Additionally, in order for us to provide certain services and goods in connection with our website, we contract with other companies and individuals.  TSF’s website may contain “links” to the websites of some of these important partners, beneficiaries and third parties, but our inclusion of such links does not, by itself, imply any endorsement of the content on their sites or of their owners, operators or contractors.  TSF’s privacy practices are not applicable at any third-party websites, because TSF does not govern them.  Anytime you leave the TSF website, we have no control regarding what information may be collected about you, nor do we control what third parties might do with the information.  For example, when you click on a partner’s hyperlinked logo or name at the TSF site, you will be connected with the third-party partner’s website (even if the TSF name and/or logo is on the screen).  This partner website should have its own privacy policy applying to the use of and transactions at its website.  TSF is not responsible for the content of those websites, any products or services that may be offered through those websites, any other use of those websites or any consequences or results of using or interacting with those websites, so it is important that you review any privacy policies on third-party websites carefully before you attempt to use any services, programs or products offered there.

CHANGES TO PRIVACY POLICY:  From time to time, TSF may amend its privacy practices to address changing technology, security measures, website functionality and internal company policies.  We may change or update portions of this Privacy Policy at any time and without prior notice to you.  Please check back to this page from time to time so you are aware of any changes or updates to this Privacy Policy.  We will indicate on this page the “Last Updated” date of our Privacy Policy, as it may have been amended.  Regardless of the “Last Updated” date, however, our most updated Privacy Policy at a given time always will be deemed to govern and apply to all past and current activities, information submissions, communications, etc.  Please contact us if you have any questions about changes to our privacy practices.

ONLINE PRIVACY POLICY ONLY:  Except as specifically stated above, this online Privacy Policy applies only to information collected through our website and not to information collected offline.  Furthermore, TSF makes no representation that its Privacy Policy and privacy practices comply with the laws of any country outside the United States of America.

CONTACTING TSF:  If you wish to change your privacy preferences or have any questions about our Privacy Policy or our website, please contact us by any of the following methods:

Regular Postal Mail:
The Sheckler Foundation
1011 Calle Amanecer
San Clemente, CA  92673

E-Mail: info@shecklerfoundation.org

Telephone:  (949) 542-3079, Monday through Friday, 9:00AM - 5:00PM Pacific Time.

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