Privacy Policy
I Gift Aid is the trading name of HEART Humanitarian Foundation. This policy is the same one published at hearthumanitarianfoundation.org, because it is the same organisation.
Last updated: 13 September 2026
This policy explains what personal information HEART Humanitarian Foundation collects, why we collect it, who we share it with, and what you can ask us to do with it.
1. Who we are
HEART Humanitarian Foundation is a nonprofit corporation registered in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (entity 0015475201) and a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt public charity (EIN 42-2670441). Our registered address is 502 W 7th St, Suite 100, Erie, PA 16502-1333, United States. We are responsible for the personal information described in this policy.
We trade as I Gift Aid (doing business as, Pennsylvania registration 0015492886). I Gift Aid is a trading name, not a separate organisation — HEART Humanitarian Foundation is responsible for everything done under either name.
1.1 What this policy covers
This policy applies to:
- hearthumanitarianfoundation.org — this website
- igiftaid.org — our website under the I Gift Aid trading name, where the same policy is published
- my.igiftaid.org — the secure area where approved applicants sign in to see their campaign and request a payment
- the WhatsApp service we operate under the I Gift Aid name
If we add another website or trading name, we will name it here rather than rely on a general phrase.
Questions about this policy: Info@HeartHumanitarianFoundation.Org or +1 (717) 881-8186.
2. Information we collect
2.1 If you apply for assistance
- Your name, and the names and ages of members of your household
- Your location, living situation and a description of your circumstances
- Contact details — phone number, WhatsApp number, email address
- Photographs you choose to send us of your family or your shelter
- Details needed to transfer funds to you
- Identity information used to verify that you are who you say you are
Some of this is sensitive. We ask only for what we need to assess an application and to transfer funds lawfully.
2.2 If you donate
Donations are processed by Stripe and PayPal. We do not receive or store your card or bank details. We receive the information the payment processor passes to us, which typically includes your name, email address and the amount, so that we can acknowledge your gift and keep the records the IRS requires of us.
2.3 If you contact us
Your message and the contact details you send it from, including WhatsApp messages you send to our business number.
2.4 If you visit this website
Our web host records standard server log information, including IP address, browser type and pages requested.
This site runs no advertising trackers, no analytics, and no profiling cookies — neither ours nor anyone else's. It is a set of static pages with no embedded map, no translation widget, and no payment or form embeds.
The single outbound request a page makes is to Google Fonts, for the two typefaces the site is set in. Google receives your IP address in order to serve them. Nothing else on this site contacts a third party unless you click a link.
Our sister site, hearthumanitarianfoundation.org, is hosted elsewhere and does load some third-party content; its own privacy policy describes that.
3. Why we use it
- To assess and decide applications for assistance
- To verify identity and need, and to screen against sanctions lists as United States law requires of us
- To create and run fundraising campaigns for approved applicants
- To transfer funds to beneficiaries and record that we have done so
- To acknowledge donations and keep the financial records required of a 501(c)(3) charity
- To answer your questions and support you through the process
- To meet our legal, tax and reporting obligations
We do not sell personal information. We do not share it for anyone else's marketing.
4. Third parties who handle information for us
This site and our operations rely on the following third parties. Each has its own privacy policy governing what it does with information it receives.
| Stripe | Processes donations. Receives your payment details directly; we never see them. |
|---|---|
| PayPal | Processes donations. Receives your payment details directly; we never see them. |
| Intuit (QuickBooks) | Keeps our accounts. Receives our bank transactions, and the donation records our payment processors pass on, so that we can keep the books and file the returns the IRS requires. |
| Adobe Acrobat Sign | Hosts the application forms. Applicant information is submitted through Adobe's systems. |
| Microsoft 365 | Hosts our email. |
| WhatsApp / Meta Platforms | Carries messages to and from our business number, and hosts our Facebook Page. |
| Google Maps | Used on hearthumanitarianfoundation.org, not on this site. No map is embedded here. |
| Google Translate | Used on hearthumanitarianfoundation.org, not on this site. No translation widget runs here. |
| YouTube | We link to videos on YouTube. Following a link takes you to Google's platform under its terms. |
| Crowdfunding platforms | Approved campaigns are hosted on established platforms such as GoFundMe or Chuffed, which process donor payments under their own policies. |
| Plaid | Reads our own bank account so we can check that money we expected has arrived. It sees the transactions on that account, which include the names of people and organisations who paid us. |
| Kraken | The regulated exchange we use to convert funds before sending a payment. It holds our account and the record of payments we send out. |
| Sumsub | Carries out identity and sanctions checks where we are required to do them. Receives identity documents and the details you give us to verify who you are. |
| Anthropic | Provides the AI assistant that helps applicants complete an application by message, and that reads payment receipts we upload so the figures do not have to be typed in by hand. It therefore receives the content of those conversations and those receipts. It does not receive our accounting records, and none of this information is used to train AI models. |
| Resend and Brevo | Deliver the email we send you, and receive your email address and the contents of those messages. |
| Cloudflare | Routes email sent to our igiftaid.org addresses. |
| Hetzner | Hosts the secure applicant area and the internal systems that process applications and payments, on servers in Finland. See section 5. |
| GoDaddy | Hosts hearthumanitarianfoundation.org, our sister site. Not this site. |
| Railway | Hosts this site and keeps server logs. |
4.1 Payments are recorded on a public blockchain
Where we send a payment in cryptocurrency, that payment is written to a public blockchain. The wallet address it was sent to, the amount and the date are visible to anyone, permanently, and cannot be edited or deleted by us or by anyone else. This is how the technology works and is not something we can switch off.
A wallet address is not your name, and we do not publish the connection between the two. But if you give the same address to someone else, or publish it yourself, the payments we sent you can be linked to you. Tell us if you would rather be paid another way.
We may also disclose information where we are legally required to, or where it is necessary to establish or defend a legal claim.
5. International transfers
We are based in the United States and our beneficiaries are largely in Gaza and the West Bank, so information necessarily moves between countries, including to and from countries whose data protection laws differ from those where you live. We take reasonable steps to protect it wherever it is held.
Where our systems physically are. They are not all in one country, and we are a United States charity whose main systems are not in the United States.
- The secure applicant area at my.igiftaid.org, and the internal systems that process applications and payments, run on servers in Finland, within the European Union, operated for us by Hetzner. This is where information about applicants and payments is held.
- Our two public websites are hosted separately — hearthumanitarianfoundation.org by GoDaddy, igiftaid.org by Railway.
- Our email is hosted by Microsoft.
The other organisations named in section 4 hold information in their own locations under their own policies.
6. How long we keep it
We keep records for as long as we need them for the purpose we collected them for, and then for as long as the law requires. In practice:
- Donation and financial records: at least seven years, to meet IRS recordkeeping and Form 990 reporting requirements.
- Approved applications and payment records: at least seven years, as part of the charity's financial record.
- Applications that were not approved: normally no more than two years, unless we are required to keep them longer.
- General correspondence: normally no more than two years.
7. Your choices and rights
Pennsylvania has no comprehensive consumer privacy statute, and the California Consumer Privacy Act does not generally apply to nonprofit organisations. We are therefore not compelled by those laws to offer the rights below. We offer them anyway, as a matter of policy:
- Access — ask us what personal information we hold about you
- Correction — ask us to fix information that is wrong
- Deletion — ask us to erase your information, subject to records we are legally required to keep
- Withdraw consent — tell us to stop contacting you, or to stop messaging you on WhatsApp, at any time
To exercise any of these, email Info@HeartHumanitarianFoundation.Org. We will respond within thirty days. See our data deletion page for the deletion process specifically, including data associated with Facebook and WhatsApp.
If you are in the United Kingdom or the European Economic Area and believe we hold information about you, contact us and we will handle your request in line with the rights those regimes give you.
8. Children
This website is not directed at children and we do not knowingly collect information from children under 13 through it. Applications for assistance necessarily include information about children in an applicant household; that information is provided by the adult applicant and is used only to assess and deliver assistance to that household. If you believe a child has given us information directly, contact us and we will delete it.
9. Cookies and your choices
We set no cookies for advertising, analytics or profiling, and no third party sets any through this site.
| Google Fonts | Serves the two typefaces this site uses. Google receives your IP address to deliver them. It sets no cookies here. |
|---|---|
| Chuffed, GoFundMe | Only reached when you click through to them. Nothing is set until you do, and their own policies apply once you are there. |
| Only if you choose to message us. Handled as described in section 4. |
Our cookie notice remembers your choice in your own browser's local storage, not in a cookie and not on our servers. To change it, clear this site's data in your browser and the notice will appear again. The site works fully with cookies blocked.
We are a United States charity. Neither federal law nor Pennsylvania law requires a cookie banner of us, and the California Consumer Privacy Act does not generally apply to nonprofit organisations. We show the notice anyway, and we would rather state plainly that there is nothing to consent to than imply otherwise.
10. Security
We limit access to personal information to the people who need it to do this work, use reputable service providers, and serve this site over HTTPS. No system is perfectly secure, and we cannot guarantee the security of information while it is in transit to us.
11. Changes
If we change this policy we will update the date at the top of this page. Material changes will be noted on the home page.
12. Contact
HEART Humanitarian Foundation
502 W 7th St, Suite 100
Erie, PA 16502-1333, United States
Info@HeartHumanitarianFoundation.Org ·
+1 (717) 881-8186