What personal data is stored and who can access it?

The Nonprofit Builder CRM organises transactions between foundations, their grantees and consultants who offer services. These services come in the form of consulting projects. The grantees request the consulting projects from the consultant which are paid for by the foundations. All personal data in the system relates to these transactions. 

Who can see what?

1. Nonprofit Builder staff can see all the data in the Nonprofit Builder CRM.

2. Consultant profiles are not visible to the public, but only to authenticated users:

• Consultant profiles are visible to all foundation staff.
• Consultant profiles are visible to all other consultants.
• Consultant profiles are visible to grantees if a foundation has authorised access by using the Like function, and if the Nonprofit Builder has authorised access by adding them to the various directories accessible to grantees.  

3. Data about consulting projects comprises: the project proposal, details on cost and payments, the feedback reports from both consultants and grantee. Who can see this data?

• Details of the project are visible only to those who need to know: the contracted consultant, the grantee benefitting from the project, and the foundation paying for it.
• The grantee's feedback report about the performance of the consultant is not visible to the consultant, but only to Nonprofit Builder and the foundation. Likewise, the consultant's feedback report is not visible to the grantee, but only to Nonprofit Builder and the foundation.
• A one-line summary of all projects is listed on the grantees profile and the consultants profile (parties to the project, area expertise, title, date).

4. Foundation profiles and foundation staff profiles are only visible to the staff of that foundation.

5. Grantee profiles are only visible to their sponsoring foundation and to the grantee staff.

Each organisation using the service can manage its own account data such as editing its profile, adding staff member accounts and removing them. They may not edit or delete data relating to transactions unless as part of the CRM workflows.

Nonprofit Builder does not store any personal data that is sensitive, like information about religion, political views or health status.

Where is data stored?

• Data on users accounts, consultant profiles, and consulting projects (project proposals, feedback reports and payments) is stored in the CRM.
• Data on training courses, including enrolment, feedback, and participation, is stored in Google Sheets.
• Data on payments to consultants is stored in Google Sheets, and invoices are stored in Google Drive.

Data retention: Any consultant may request to be removed from the platform at any time. In case the consultant has no paid work history on the platform, the full account may be deleted. If the consultant has a paid work history, the consultant will be unpublished (no longer visible in the search) but the records of the consulting projects including data on payments, invoices and feedback reports will be kept for ten years for financial compliance purposes. Likewise, data on foundations and grantees will be retained for ten years for financial compliance purposes.

Security Measures 

We take all reasonable steps to protect user data, in particular:

• Our developers follow best practices for security and use modern software frameworks that protect our CRM against hacks like cross-site scripting and sql injection.
• We don't allow the use of passwords to authenticate, knowing that some users still use unsafe passwords.

Attempts to breach our systems will considered a criminal offense and shall be reported to the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (FDPIC) and the police.

Location of data and court-authorized access,

The data processors we use are Digital Ocean (who host the CRM), Google Workspace (we use Gmail for email and Sheets for project financial tracking and Drive for invoice storage), Zoom (for teleconferencing) and Postmark (for transactional email). 

These services are located in the USA so Nonprofit Builder data is subject to the jurisdiction of the USA in terms of court-authorized access to your data by law enforcement agencies or by other governmental agencies. Nonprofit Builder is domiciled in Switzerland so Nonprofit Builder data is also subject to the jurisdiction of Switzerland in terms of court-authorized access.

The Nonprofit Builder CRM installs a cookie in the user's browser to manage user login sessions, so that the user may conveniently log in repeatedly without having to authenticate each time. The Postmark system also uses a tracking pixel when we send transactional emails, so we can see if they have been opened and if we have email deliverability issues. There is no other tracking, we don't use any visitor analytics software like Google Analytics.

Nonprofit Builder does not communicate any user data to third parties. 

Applicable laws and data protection officer

Nonprofit Builder is domiciled in Switzerland, so the Federal Act on Data Protection (FADP) applies. Some Nonprofit Builder users are domiciled in the European Union, so the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) applies.

For the purposes of the FADP and GDPR, and for any questions or requests about personal data, the Nonprofit Builder data protection officer is Daniel D'Esposito who can be reached at: daniel@nonprofitbuilder.org.

Last updated: 5 December 2023