1. Who We Are

DonorSeek is operated by Donor Seek Ltd, a company registered in New Zealand. We are responsible for the personal information we collect for our own purposes, such as charity and donor portal accounts. When a charity uses DonorSeek to keep information about its donors, fundraisers, members and volunteers, DonorSeek holds that information on the charity’s behalf, as its agent under the Privacy Act 2020. The charity decides how that information is used and remains responsible for it, and you can ask the charity about it directly.

If you have questions about your privacy, contact our Privacy Officer at: admin@donorseek.com

2. What Information We Collect

2.1 Account Information

When you create an account, we collect:

• Your name and email address
• A password (stored as a secure hash — we never store your plain-text password)
• Organisation name (for charity accounts)

2.2 Donor and Donation Data (Charity App)

Charities using DonorSeek upload or enter information about their donors and donations, which may include:

• Donor names and email addresses
• Phone numbers and postal addresses
• Whether a donor is a person or an organisation (such as a company or trust), and the name to use when writing to them
• Donation amounts, dates, and descriptions
• Receipt history and delivery status
• Notes, tags, custom fields, households, and relationships between donors (for example, partners or an employer), recorded by the charity’s staff
• Contact preferences, including whether you have unsubscribed or asked not to be contacted

2.3 Donation Receipt Data (Donor App)

Donors using DonorSeek may upload or receive:

• Charitable donation receipts (including amounts and charity details)
• Scanned receipt images (Pro tier)
• Tax credit summaries generated from receipt data
• When you upload a receipt PDF, the file is sent securely to Mistral (an EU-based AI company) for text extraction. Mistral processes the document to identify charity name, IRD/registration number, donor name, amount, and date so we can pre-fill these fields for you. Mistral does not retain the document after processing. We only send PDFs you have explicitly uploaded — never receipts received by your charity through the platform.

2.4 Usage and Technical Data

When you use our services, we automatically collect certain technical data including:

• Log data (IP addresses, browser type, pages visited, timestamps)
• Device information
• Performance and error logs

2.5 Payment Information

Payment processing is handled entirely by Stripe. We do not collect or store full payment card details or bank account numbers. We retain only transaction records (amount, date, subscription status) for billing and accounting purposes. For gifts and payments you make to a charity through DonorSeek, see 2.6 and 2.9.

2.6 Online Donations and Recurring Gifts

When you give through a charity’s DonorSeek fundraising page or donation form, we collect your name, email address, gift amount and frequency, and any answers you give to questions the charity has added to its form. Your payment is made to the charity’s own Stripe account. The charity uses these details to record your gift, email your tax receipt and, for recurring gifts, let you manage your gift. While your payment is being confirmed we hold these details in a temporary record that is deleted after 30 days; the donation record itself is kept as described in section 6.

If you set up a recurring gift, we email you a private link to update your payment details, change your amount or stop your gift. Anyone with the link can manage that gift, so please keep it private. The charity can issue a new link, which cancels the old one.

2.7 Dedications and eCards

If you dedicate a gift and ask us to send an eCard, we collect the recipient’s name and email address and your message, and use them only to send that one email on your behalf. The eCard never shows the amount you gave. Please only give us someone’s details if you’re confident they would be happy to receive the card.

2.8 Fundraising Pages and the Supporter Feed

If you create a fundraising page for a charity’s campaign, we collect your name, email address, and anything you choose to write (page title, story, goal, team name). Your name, page title, story, goal, team and running total are public on your page and on the campaign’s leaderboards. Your email address is never shown publicly; we use it to send you a private link to manage your page and, unless you turn them off, emails when someone gives through your page. The charity can see your details and can approve, pause or remove your page. You must be 16 or older to create a fundraising page.

When you donate on a campaign or fundraising page, the page may show that you gave. We show your first name and the initial of your last name — never your full surname — with the amount and any message you choose to leave. You can choose to appear as “Anonymous”, and to hide your amount. If you give through someone’s fundraising page, they see the same information and receive an email about your gift. Your full name, email address and postal address are only ever given to the charity.

2.9 Pledges and Memberships

If you pledge to give to a charity over time, the charity records your pledge (the total, the schedule and which payments have been received) in DonorSeek. If the charity lets you pay online, we email you a private link to see your schedule and pay, and a reminder a few days before each payment is due. A tax receipt is issued for each payment when it is received.

If you become a member of a charity through DonorSeek, we record your membership level, when it started and when it renews or ends, and the payments you make. Your card details are held by Stripe, not DonorSeek. We email you a confirmation, a private link to manage your membership, and a reminder before it renews or expires. Membership fees are not donations, so no tax receipt is issued for them.

2.10 Newsletters, Appeals and Sign-up Forms

If a charity emails you through DonorSeek, we record that the email was sent to you. Unless the charity has switched it off, a newsletter or appeal contains a small image and tracked links that tell us whether and when you opened it and which links you clicked. We don’t record your location, device or IP address from this. Charities use it to see which messages are useful and to avoid emailing people who aren’t interested. Most email apps let you block images, which stops open tracking.

If you sign up to a charity’s newsletter through a DonorSeek form, we collect your email address (and name, if asked) and record the date and the form you used, as a record of your consent. The form is protected against automated abuse by Cloudflare Turnstile.

We also record when an email to you bounces or is reported as spam, so the charity stops emailing that address.

2.11 Documents, Notes and Tasks

A charity may upload documents about you to your donor record, such as a letter about a gift in your will or a signed pledge form. These are stored privately, are visible only to that charity’s staff (some only to its owners and administrators), and are never shown publicly.

Charity staff may record notes and follow-up tasks about you (for example, a reminder to thank you for a gift). DonorSeek emails task reminders to the staff member responsible. They are never sent to you.

2.12 Gift Recognition

A charity may record that a gift paid by someone else is also credited to you — for example, a gift from your household, your employer or a family trust. This is for the charity’s own records. Your tax receipt always goes to whoever paid.

2.13 Volunteers

If you volunteer for a charity that uses DonorSeek, the charity may record your name, contact details, skills, availability, the shifts or roles you help with, and the hours you give. Only the charity’s staff can see this. You don’t have a login, and nothing is shown publicly.

2.14 Keeping Records Accurate

If a charity finds it has two records for you, it may combine them. Your giving history, receipts and preferences move to one record. If you have ever unsubscribed or asked not to be contacted on either record, that choice is kept.

3. How We Use Your Information

We use your information to:

• Provide, operate, and maintain the DonorSeek services
• Process transactions and manage your subscription
• Process donations, recurring gifts, pledges and membership payments on a charity’s behalf, through the charity’s own Stripe account
• Send you service notifications, such as email confirmation links and receipt delivery confirmations
• Send emails on a charity’s behalf: tax receipts, eCards, pledge and membership reminders, emails to fundraisers, and the charity’s own newsletters and appeals
• Send charity staff reminders about their tasks
• Monitor email bounces and spam complaints, so we stop emailing addresses that can’t or don’t want to receive email, and protect email delivery for every charity
• Respond to your enquiries and provide customer support
• Improve and develop our services (using anonymised, aggregated data)
• Comply with legal obligations, including tax and financial record-keeping requirements
• Protect against fraud, abuse, and security threats

We do not sell your personal information to third parties. We do not use your information for advertising purposes. Charities may use DonorSeek to send you their own newsletters and appeals (see 2.10).

4. Legal Basis for Processing

We process your personal information on the following bases:

• Contract: Processing necessary to provide services you have signed up for.
• Legitimate interests: Improving our services, preventing fraud, and maintaining security.
• Legal obligation: Complying with New Zealand law, including the Privacy Act 2020.
• Consent: Where we rely on your consent (such as for optional marketing communications), you may withdraw it at any time.

Charities are responsible for making sure they may send you their newsletters and appeals under the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007. Every newsletter or appeal sent through DonorSeek should include an unsubscribe link.

5. Who We Share Your Information With

We may share your information with trusted third-party service providers who help us operate DonorSeek:

• Supabase – database hosting and authentication infrastructure. Donor records, donations, and account data are stored in Supabase’s Sydney, Australia region (AWS ap-southeast-2). Documents that charities upload are stored in the same region. Supabase is a US company but the data itself is held in Australia.
• Vercel – application hosting (United States). Vercel runs the DonorSeek web applications and serves the pages you see. Vercel sees only the data that flows through a given request — it doesn’t have direct database access.
• Stripe – payment processing (United States). For DonorSeek’s own subscription billing, Stripe receives the charity’s contact and billing details. When you give or pay through a charity’s DonorSeek page or form, your payment is made to the charity’s own Stripe account; Stripe receives your name, email address and payment details so it can process the payment (and, for recurring gifts and memberships, charge you on schedule). DonorSeek never sees or stores your card or bank account numbers.
• Resend – email delivery (United States). Donor names and email addresses pass through Resend when receipts are emailed, and when charities send newsletters, appeals, reminders and other emails through DonorSeek. A charity can connect its own Resend account instead.
• Mailgun – alternative email provider (US or EU region depending on the charity’s choice). Used only if a charity configures their own Mailgun account through DonorSeek’s custom-email-provider feature.
• Postmark – alternative email provider (United States). Used only if a charity connects its own Postmark account.
• Mistral – receipt text recognition (France/EU). Used only on the donor app when a donor uploads a receipt PDF. PDFs are sent for text extraction and not retained by Mistral.
• Xero – accounting integration (Australia or NZ). Used only when a charity connects their Xero account; donor and donation data flows to Xero contacts on the charity’s instruction.
• Cloudflare – bot protection (United States). Cloudflare Turnstile checks that sign-ins, newsletter sign-ups and fundraiser sign-ups come from a person, not a bot. It receives your IP address and browser information when the form loads.
• YouTube (Google) and Vimeo – video (United States). If a charity adds a video to a campaign page, the player loads from YouTube’s privacy-enhanced mode or from Vimeo with “do not track” set. The provider receives your IP address and browser information when the player loads, under its own privacy policy. No information you have given DonorSeek is sent to them.

Each provider is contractually required to handle your data securely and only for the purposes we’ve directed. Each is in a country we consider to have comparable privacy safeguards, or where the disclosure is necessary to provide the service you’ve signed up for. We monitor each provider’s privacy practices and will update this notice if any change.

We may also disclose your information if required to do so by law, or to protect the rights, property, or safety of DonorSeek, our users, or the public.

6. Data Retention

We retain different categories of data for different periods, matched to the purpose for which we collected it:

• Donor account information and active donation records: Kept while your account is active. If you close your DonorSeek donor account, your account-level data (name, email, secondary emails, preferences) is deleted within 30 days.
• Donation receipts and tax records: Charities may need to retain donation records for up to 7 years to comply with IRD record-keeping requirements. These records belong to the charity, not to DonorSeek directly. Closing your DonorSeek donor account does not delete records held by individual charities.
• Other information charities keep: donor, fundraiser, member and volunteer records — including documents, notes, tasks, gift recognition and email history — are kept until the charity deletes them or closes its DonorSeek account. When a charity deletes a donor’s record, the documents, tasks and gift-recognition records attached to it are deleted too. You can ask a charity to delete your information, subject to its legal obligations (such as keeping tax records).
• Combined records: when a charity combines two records for you, the old record is kept only as a pointer to the combined one, so earlier receipts and unsubscribe links keep working.
• Temporary checkout records for online donations: deleted after 30 days.
• Access and audit logs: Kept for 24 months. These records (who accessed what, when, from where) are how we detect and investigate privacy breaches. After 24 months they are automatically purged.
• Per-record edit history: Kept for the lifetime of the underlying donor or donation record. When the record is deleted, its history is deleted with it.
• Resolved correction and connection requests: Kept for 24 months after resolution, then purged.
• Rate-limit and signup-check cache: Kept for 90 days, then purged.

A nightly automated process enforces these windows. Where law requires longer retention (e.g. financial records under tax law), the legal requirement takes precedence.

7. Security

We implement appropriate technical and organisational measures to protect your information against unauthorised access, disclosure, alteration, or destruction. These include:

• Encryption of data in transit (TLS 1.2+) and at rest
• Secure password hashing using industry-standard algorithms
• Row-level security policies in the database, ensuring users can only access their own data
• Two-factor sign-in for charity accounts, enforced on every request once it’s set up
• Encryption of sensitive credentials (third-party API keys, OAuth tokens) using AES-256-GCM with keys held separately from the encrypted data
• Private storage for documents, checked for unsafe content when uploaded and only available through short-lived download links
• Application-level audit logging of privacy-sensitive actions (including report downloads), retained for 24 months and used for breach detection and investigation
• Bot protection on all authentication forms and public sign-up forms (Cloudflare Turnstile)
• Automatic session timeout after 60 minutes of inactivity
• Regular dependency scanning and security review by an independent SAST tool

No method of internet transmission or electronic storage is 100% secure. We cannot guarantee absolute security, but we take reasonable steps to protect your information. If a breach occurs that may cause serious harm, we will notify affected individuals and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner in accordance with the Privacy Act 2020.

8. Cookies and Tracking

DonorSeek uses cookies and similar technologies for essential service functions, including authentication (keeping you logged in) and security. We do not use tracking cookies for advertising or cross-site tracking purposes.

Newsletters and appeals sent through DonorSeek may include a small image and tracked links that show whether an email was opened and which links were clicked (see 2.10). This is not a cookie, is not used for advertising, and the charity can switch it off.

If a campaign page includes a YouTube or Vimeo video, the video player may set its own cookies when you play the video, under that provider’s policy.

You can configure your browser to refuse cookies, but doing so may affect the functionality of our service.

9. Your Rights

Under the New Zealand Privacy Act 2020, you have the right to:

• Access the personal information we hold about you. If you have a donor portal account, you can download a copy of your account and the giving records charities have linked to it at any time by going to **Account → Download your data**. For other information a charity keeps about you (such as notes, documents or volunteer records), ask the charity, or ask us and we’ll pass your request on. You can also email us at admin@donorseek.com and we’ll provide the information within 20 working days.
• Correct any personal information that is inaccurate or incomplete. Use the donor portal to update most of your details directly, or email us if you need help.
• Request deletion of your personal information. You can delete your donor portal account directly from the app (Account → Delete My Account). Note that this does not remove records held by individual charities — those are subject to their own retention obligations.
• Object to certain types of processing.
• Stop newsletters and appeals by using the unsubscribe link in any of them. This doesn’t stop your tax receipts. Receipt emails have their own unsubscribe link, which stops all email from that charity. You can also ask the charity directly.
• Lodge a complaint with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner at www.privacy.org.nz if you believe your privacy rights have been breached.

To exercise any of these rights, contact us at admin@donorseek.com. We will respond within 20 working days as required by the Privacy Act 2020.

If you believe your privacy rights have been breached, you may also lodge a complaint with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner at www.privacy.org.nz.

10. Children’s Privacy

DonorSeek is designed for use by adults. We do not knowingly create accounts for children under 16. You must be 16 or older to create a fundraising page, because fundraising pages are public. If you are a charity using DonorSeek, you may hold donor records relating to minors (for example, where a parent has donated on behalf of a child) — those records are managed by the charity under its own privacy obligations. If you believe we have inadvertently created an account or fundraising page for a child under 16, please contact us at admin@donorseek.com.

11. Changes to This Privacy Notice

We may update this Privacy Notice from time to time to reflect changes in our practices or legal obligations. We will notify you of material changes by email or via a notice within the application. The date at the top of this page indicates when the notice was last revised.

12. Contact Us

For any privacy-related questions, requests, or complaints, please contact us: Privacy Officer, Donor Seek Ltd — admin@donorseek.com.