Privacy Policy

Donor Privacy Policy

The Garden Conservancy respects the privacy of each of our members and donors. We are committed to protecting your privacy, whether your donation is made online, by mail, by telephone, at an Open Day or education event, or by any other method. We protect your information in a variety of ways, as described below. We will not sell, share, or trade our donors’ personally identifiable information with any other entity, except as described below. In addition, we will not send mailings to our donors on behalf of other organizations.

Members and Donors: When you make a donation, you provide your name, contact information, and standard payment information including, in many circumstances, credit card data. We do not share this contact information with any person or entity outside of the Garden Conservancy, with one exception. We may, from time to time, trade names and addresses (but never email addresses or credit card data) from our Membership (but not our Society of Fellows) with other nonprofit organizations dedicated to garden preservation or to promotion of public gardens.

Open Days visitors: Upon admittance to an Open Days garden, visitors are asked to make a donation or provide a ticket purchased in advance from the Garden Conservancy. Visitors are asked but not required to sign guest registers with their name, address, and email. We do not share this contact information with any person or entity outside of the Garden Conservancy. We may use your mailing address or email to share information about the Garden Conservancy and its activities with you.

Through our website, www.gardenconservancy.org, we offer convenient online access to information about our programs and events, as well as ways to participate in them. The Fellows Portal section of our website, restricted to members of our Society of Fellows, provides password-protected access to further information and images from our Fellows programs, including our garden-study tours. When you visit our website, we may collect the IP address of your device or your social media ID, but we will not collect other personal information from you unless you provide the information to us voluntarily and knowingly. We may also collect information you voluntarily provide to us over the phone, in email, through a face-to-face conversation, or through online and offline forms such as surveys, donation forms, email opt-in forms, event registration/participation, and garden information forms that you populate. We will never share this information without your explicit knowledge and approval.

We use industry standard safeguards to protect your information. We protect the security of credit card transactions using a number of measures such as encryption, access controls, network firewalls, and physical security. These measures make it extremely difficult for anyone to intercept the credit card information you send to us. When we work with other companies to process credit card transactions, we require that those companies also use encryption and other appropriate security measures.

The Garden Conservancy uses vendors to assist with processing and managing donations, donor data, donor mailings, and donor benefits. We give these vendors access to donor data as necessary. Our vendors are bound by strict confidentiality rules and are permitted to use donor data only to support Garden Conservancy operations. In addition, we make disclosures as required by law.

This donor privacy policy may be changed or updated from time to time. By visiting the Garden Conservancy at www.gardenconservancy.org, you accept the practices described in this policy.