How we handle your information

This policy explains how Project Pollinator handles information collected through https://projectpollinator.org, including its contact, volunteer, garden site suggestion, partnership, and giving inquiry forms, and the mailing list sign-up in the site footer.

It also explains what we do not collect. This site does not take payments, does not ask for card details, and does not publish information about visitors.

Contact form: your name, email address, optional phone number, the inquiry category you choose, and your message.

Volunteer interest form: your name, email address, optional phone number, the kind of volunteer you are, optional age group, optional school or organization, optional neighborhood, the interests you select, optional availability, and your message. We ask your age group only so we can send the right sign-up steps to you or your guardian.

Garden site suggestion form: your name, email address, the location you describe, what you know about the space, your relationship to the property, the ownership status if you know it, and an optional photograph.

Partnership inquiry form: your organization's name, the contact person's name, email address, the kind of partnership you are interested in, and your message.

Giving inquiry form: your name, email address, the amount or type of support you are interested in, and an optional message. No payment is processed on this website.

Mailing list: your email address and the fact that you subscribed through the website.

A photograph attached to a site suggestion is stored in private storage, not on the public website. It is visible only to Project Pollinator team members who review suggestions.

We do not publish a photo of a person, a student, or a recognizable private property without permission. If you send a photograph of a minor, please confirm that a parent or guardian agrees to it being shared with our team.

Photographs published in the site gallery are ones we have permission to use. Where a photographer is credited, the credit is shown with the photograph.

Form submissions are stored in our website's private database. They are visible only to signed-in administrators of Project Pollinator. They are not shown on any public page and are not included in search engine indexes.

A notification containing your message is emailed to the organization's inbox so that a person can respond. Our email delivery uses a transactional email provider, which processes the message in order to deliver it.

We do not sell, rent, trade, or share your information with advertisers or data brokers.

To keep the forms usable, each submission passes through automated checks. These include a hidden field that people do not fill in, a submission-timing check, a limit on how much text and how many links a message may contain, and a rate limit of five submissions per form per hour from one connection.

For rate limiting we derive a short, non-reversible hash from a technical network identifier supplied by our hosting provider. We store only that hash and the form name, never your raw network address, and the record is used only for abuse prevention.

Many of our supporters and volunteers are students. We do not create a public directory of young people, and we do not publish students' names, home addresses, personal contact details, or unapproved photographs.

If you are under 18, please involve a parent, guardian, teacher, or approved program contact before submitting a form or joining the mailing list. When a minor expresses interest in volunteering, we route the conversation through that adult and ask for written permission before any activity.

We ask for an optional age group rather than a date of birth, and we do not ask for a home address through any form on this site.

Inquiry records are kept while they are useful for responding to you, maintaining a relationship with you, and meeting our recordkeeping obligations as a nonprofit organization.

Mailing list addresses are kept until you ask to be removed. Abuse-prevention hashes are short-lived markers kept only for the rate-limit window.

You can ask us to update or delete what you have sent at any time.

Our hosting platform may record standard technical information such as the pages requested, the browser type, and an approximate region, in order to keep the site working and secure.

This site does not run advertising trackers, does not use third-party marketing pixels, and does not build visitor profiles.

You can ask us to correct or delete the information you have given us, ask to be removed from the mailing list, or ask what we hold about you. Write to makeabuzz@projectpollinator.org and we will respond as quickly as we can.

If you believe information we hold about you is incorrect, tell us and we will correct it.

We aim for this site to be usable with a keyboard, a screen reader, and on a phone. Pages use a single main heading, forms use labeled fields and clear error messages, and photographs carry descriptions of the insects, plants, and activities they show.

If any part of this site is difficult for you to use, email makeabuzz@projectpollinator.org and describe what happened. We will help directly and fix what we can.

If our practices change — for example, if online donations become available — we will update this page before the change takes effect.