Privacy Policy

My Sea to Sky is a people-powered organization that was founded in 2014 to defend, protect, and restore Howe Sound. To carry out our mission, it’s important to communicate with you.

This privacy policy reflects our best efforts to respect your privacy, while ensuring we can communicate clearly and effectively with you. Below we explain how we collect, use, and safeguard your personal information.

Information we collect and how we use it

Personal information

“Personal information” is any information that can be used to identify (or infer the identity of) a specific person, including, for example, your name, address, birth date, gender, etc. In some cases, your computer’s IP address can be considered personal information, as it may give some indication of your geographic location.

We may ask you for personal information in a variety of ways, including website forms, surveys, mail-in forms, over the phone, and in person.

There are a range of reasons why we may ask you for this information, including: to process a donation or registration; to fulfil your subscription to an e-newsletter; to allow you to send letters or sign a petition via our online action platforms; to invite you to events; or to provide other information about us which might interest you. We may also contact you by mail, email, or phone about opportunities to donate in support of our work.

Your choice to provide us with your personal information is at your discretion. You may always elect to withhold information. In some cases, we will require your personal information in order to fulfil something you’ve asked of us. For example, when you make a donation, we’re required by law to take your full name and mailing address in order to send you a receipt.

Cookies and data technology

We use cookies and other technology on our websites to make them easier to use, optimize your website experience, and so that we can learn about how you use them. Information collected this way may include (but is not limited to) your IP address and internet service provider, the type of web browser and operating system you used, and which of our website pages you visited. We use links in our emails to track open and click-through rates to help us learn what emails appeal to you most.

In some cases, interacting with our websites, social media accounts, or emails provides us with “anonymous” data, such as IP address, link clicks, page visits, the time spent on a page, etc. We use Google Analytics on our website to learn where you are, when you’re using our site, and what content you find most interesting. This helps us stay relevant.

We may also use third-party cookies, beacons, and other storage technologies to understand what website content is most important to you so that we can measure our performance and target sponsored and unsponsored content to you on those third-party party platforms. For example, we use Facebook’s tracking pixel to learn about what content you are interested in on our website so that we can serve only our most relevant advertising to you on Facebook. You can opt out from such Facebook advertising by clicking “Why am I seeing this?” on our Facebook ads, clicking “Options” and then selecting “Hide all ads from this advertiser.”

It’s possible for us to put anonymous data together with personal information you give us to find out more about you. This helps us respect what we know about you. For example, when we have petitions that are meaningful locally, we try our best to send them to the affected communities and avoid sending irrelevant or too many emails.

Aggregate data

In some cases, we may aggregate your information with others peoples’ in order to report on campaigns. For example, we may count the number of people who donate or sign a petition based on their postal code. That way, we can show where people in Canada are taking action — with the number (e.g., “516 people from Toronto have donated to this campaign”) or by indicating the total on a map. We do not display your actual postal code.

Use of third parties

In many cases, we don’t actually collect and store personal information in our systems, but instead use a third party. For example, we may use ThoughtExchange to conduct surveys.

Such services have resources dedicated to maintaining security and confidentiality, and we ensure that any third-party partner has written policies about never sharing your information with anyone other than the My Sea to Sky.

Donation and credit card information

In order to donate to us, you may need to provide your credit card information.

For online donations, we do not collect your credit card information. Instead, this information is collected and processed by secure third-party, PCI-compliant services. We use Donorbox to collect your payment information, which uses Stripe to process your payment. Donorbox is PCI compliant and secured by SSL/TLS encryption.

Fundraising tools

My Sea to Sky is a registered non-profit, but to ensure our community's advocacy can be as effective as possible, we are not a charity, and donations are not eligible for a tax credit. We are grateful to say that we rely on the My Sea to Sky community for small donations that provide the majority of our funding. We cannot do our work without the financial support of our many generous donors. We do our best to reach out to as many possible individual supporters as we can. Our donors allow us to maintain our independence.

We may use information you provide (such as your postal code) to find more complete contact information from other sources (such as Canada Post) so we can reach out to you, and we may use third-party providers to help. The chance to send you a letter or give you a phone call helps us see if we’re a good fit for you when it comes to making donations. You may opt out of these communications at any time by contacting donations@myseatosky.org.

Links to other websites

Our websites contain links to websites owned and operated by other organizations. They may have their own privacy policies and terms and conditions and are not governed by this policy. We encourage you to carefully review the privacy policy and terms of use of each website you visit.

What you need to know about consent

By providing personal information to us, you allow “deemed” consent to the collection, use, and disclosure of your information in accordance with this policy.

When you provide contact information to us for one purpose, we may contact you using that information for other areas of our work. For example, if you sign a petition, we may email you about opportunities to support our work with a donation. Or, if you make a donation and provide us with your mailing address, we may also send a paper newsletter to your home in order to keep you up-to-date with work you’ve helped make happen.

We respect your right to control your personal information — please contact us immediately if you want us to stop using it in any particular way. We will fulfil your request in the timeliest way possible.

Please note: In order to adhere to Canada Customs and Revenue Agency rules, we are required to maintain donation records and are not allowed to remove this information from our internal records, even at your request.

Please also note: We may be unable to provide you with certain information or services if you do not give us specific personal information. For example, we cannot send you an e-newsletter if you don’t share your email address.

Updating your consent

If you would like to stop receiving email from us at any time, click the unsubscribe link at the bottom of any of our emails or you can email info@myseatosky.org and type “unsubscribe” in the subject line.

If you would like to stop receiving mail solicitations or our paper newsletter from us, please email info@myseatosky.org.

Upon reasonable request and notice, you may view and have corrections made to the personal information we hold about you, subject to any legal or contractual restrictions. If you are aware of any inaccuracies in the personal information we hold about you or to remove all of your information from our databases, please contact info@myseatosky.org.

Ways to prevent us from collecting “anonymous” data

Our websites use cookies and JavaScript-based tracking scripts to collect the anonymous data referred to above. To stop this from happening, adjust your web browser’s “cookie,” “cache” and JavaScript settings. Please note that doing so may affect the performance of our web properties, and in some cases may completely prevent you from using some of our pages and forms.

Information we share

General

In order to communicate with you, we sometimes work with external organizations and have them contact you on our behalf. We require them to take measures to properly safeguard your information and only use it for the purpose specified by us, in a manner consistent with this policy.

For example, we work with a mailing company that sends out our fundraising letters. We give them a list of names and mailing addresses of people we want to contact. They sort the lists, print the letters, stuff the envelopes and drop the mail off at Canada Post, which delivers it to your door. Another example is that we use an email tool to send out our e-newsletters.

Email address

We do not sell or exchange email addresses with other organizations.

In some instances, we may promote actions or petitions on our websites in partnership with other non-profit organizations. In these cases, we give you the clear option of whether you want us to share your email with them.

Address and phone number

We sometimes share the name, address, and phone number of our supporters so that we can get out the vote for provincial and federal elections. This enables us to collaborate effectively with partner organizations so that you only get contacted once. Your personal contact information is deleted as soon as the election is over. You may choose to have us withhold your information by contacting info@myseatosky.org.

How we keep your information secure

We endeavour to maintain appropriate physical, procedural, and technical safeguards for your personal information. Some information we collect may be stored and processed on servers located outside your jurisdiction of residence, including outside your country. As a result, this information may be subject to disclosure to governments, courts, or law enforcement agencies in those areas, according to their laws, without notice to us or you.

Policy updates and changes

We may change this policy from time to time without notice. Changes will be reflected on this page.

Need more information?

For further information, please contact info@myseatosky.org or send a letter to:
My Sea to Sky, PO Box 2668, Squamish, BC V8B 0B8, Canada

This document is available to the public and explains how we collect, use, and disclose information, in accordance with this policy, the Personal Information and Electronic Documents Act, the Personal Information Protection Act and other relevant legislation.