Privacy Policy

Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (LIRS) respects your privacy, recognizes your need for appropriate protection and management of your personal identifiable information that you share with us, and is committed to protecting it. LIRS has established this Privacy and Security Policy to inform you of our policies and practices regarding how we collect information from you, how we use and disclose it, and your rights with respect to such information.

Collection of personal identifiable information

Personal identifiable information is information that may be used to identify an individual, including, without limitation, your first and last name, your home or other physical address, your electronic mail address, your credit card number, your bank or brokerage account information and other similar information. When you visit our website located at lirs.org and any co-branded or successor site (the “website”), LIRS may ask you for and collect personal identifiable information from you to provide certain products and services to you; to communicate with you; to provide customer service and support to you; to send promotional e-mails and information about our company; and for internal marketing and promotional purposes. For example, we may request personal identifiable information from you when you request information concerning our services or when you make a donation to a charity.

LIRS may collect personal identifiable information about you whenever you interact with us including, but not limited to, the following:

• (i) information we collect from you from applications, registrations and other forms;
• (ii) information about your transactions with us, our business partners and our suppliers;
• (iii) information we collect from a consumer reporting agency; and
• (iv) information we receive from our server logs from your browser, including your IP address, cookie information and the page you requested.

Disclosure and sharing of personal identifiable information

LIRS will not distribute, sell, rent or otherwise disclose your personal identifiable information to any third party except as follows:

• (i) to business partners, suppliers and other third parties that help us to provide certain products and services to you, to process payments and to process donations;
• (ii) in special cases when we have reason to believe that disclosing this information is necessary to identify, contact or bring legal action against someone who may be causing injury to or interference with LIRS’s rights or property, or anyone else that could be harmed by such activities;
• (iii) in special circumstances, such as the sale or potential sale of LIRS or its assets or the bankruptcy of LIRS;
• (iv) when we believe in good faith that it is required or permitted by law; and
• (v) LIRS may occasionally share our mailing lists with other charities with a shared commitment to humanitarian causes. If you do not want us to share this information, contact us at 1-877-291-7061 or giving@lirs.org to let us know.

Opting out and other rights

To keep you in control of your personal identifiable information and the communications directed to you, we allow you to edit your marketing preferences and/or to opt out of receiving communications from LIRS. We provide you with the opportunity to access, review and correct your personal identifiable information. You may contact us regarding any inquiry or request concerning such rights by sending an email to lirs@lirs.org. LIRS reserves the right to send you certain communications relating to this website that are considered part of your account, such as technical alerts, without offering you the opportunity to opt out of receiving them.

Children’s privacy (individuals under 13 years of age)

LIRS is committed to protecting the privacy of children and encourages parents and guardians to take an active role in their child’s online activities and interests. You must be at least 13 years of age to use this website. LIRS does not knowingly collect, use or disclose personal identifiable information about visitors to our website who are under 13 years of age.

Use of cookies

Cookies are data text files that a website transfers to a visitor’s computer for record-keeping purposes. Cookies allow website operators like LIRS to facilitate and customize your visit by saving your preferences while tracking information about your visit to a website. We use the data collected by cookies to retrieve certain information previously provided by you and to help us provide our visitors with a better experience at our website. Many improvements and updates to the website are based on the data collected by cookies. Information that we track with cookies includes, without limitation, the total number of visitors and pages viewed and which areas of our website you visited. Although most browsers are initially set up to accept cookies, you can reset your browser preferences to indicate when a cookie is being sent or to refuse all cookies. However, note that if you refuse cookies, you may have difficulty accessing cookie-enabled services available at our website.

Links to other sites

Visitors to our website should be aware that when they are on the website, they could be directed to other websites that are beyond our control. There are several links to other websites from the pages on our website that take you outside our service. Many of these other websites may send their own cookies to users, collect data, or solicit personal information. LIRS has no control over these websites or how they collect, distribute or otherwise use any personal information, and we do not guaranty the security of any information that you may disclose. LIRS is not responsible or liable for the policies, actions or content of such websites. These websites are linked only for your convenience and you access them at your own risk. We encourage you to review the terms of service and privacy policies available at these other websites.

Security

LIRS takes great care in providing secure transmission of your information over the Internet. LIRS maintains current certification of compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards through Trustwave and has put in place appropriate physical, electronic, and managerial procedures to safeguard the information we collect. LIRS contracts with Blackbaud to create online donation forms and to process credit card information. Blackbaud provides the technology to ensure your donation to LIRS is secure and successful, utilizing industry-standard SSL (Secured Socket Layer) encryption technology. You can verify this encryption before providing sensitive information by looking for a lock icon in your browser’s address bar and looking for “https” at the beginning of the address web page. LIRS does not save your credit card information, and we never request sensitive information such as social security numbers. Credit card numbers are used for processing payments and for no other purposes.

Even though we strive to protect your personal identifiable information, no data transmission over the Internet can be guaranteed to be 100% secure. LIRS cannot ensure and does not warrant the security of any information that you transmit to us, which you do so at your own risk. Once we receive your transmission, we make our best effort to ensure its security on our systems. To access and use certain online services on the website, we may require you to select a unique username and password. We encourage you to protect against unauthorized access to your password and computer. To further prevent such unauthorized access, you should sign off when you have finished accessing or using the website or using your computer.

Changes to this policy

LIRS reserves the right, at any time and from time to time, to change or modify the privacy and security practices that are described herein. LIRS reserves the right to make the revised or changed Privacy and Security Policy effective for information we already have about you, as well as any information we receive in the future.

Contacting us

If you have comments or questions about our Privacy and Security Policy, please contact us by sending an email to lirs@lirs.org.

Your acceptance of these terms

By using this website, you acknowledge and agree to the terms and conditions of this Privacy and Security Policy. If you do not agree to these terms, please do not use this website.