Privacy Policy

Spiritual Transformation of African Christians ("STAC", "we") is a small Christian group based in Kyangwali Refugee Settlement, Kikuube District, Uganda. This page explains what personal information this website collects, what we do with it, and what your choices are. We try to collect as little as we need.

What we collect, and why

• Contact form. Your name, email address, phone number (optional), subject and message. We use it to read and answer your message.
• Newsletter. Your email address and, if you give it, your name. We use it to send you our newsletter. Every newsletter has an unsubscribe link.
• Volunteer accounts. Your name, email address, username, phone number, location, date of birth (optional), how you prefer to be contacted, how you heard about us, the role you describe yourself with, your answers to any eligibility questions, and an optional profile photo. Your password is stored only as a one-way hash, so we cannot read it. We also keep a record of the events you ask to help with, and the date you accepted our terms. We use this to run the volunteer programme and to contact you about events.
• Giving. Your name, email address, the amount, currency and frequency of your gift, and its status. If you pay online, you enter your card, mobile money or bank details on the payment provider's own page. We never see or store them. We receive back a reference number, the payment status and a confirmation code. If you use the pledge form instead, we record the method you would prefer. We use this to confirm your gift, keep our financial records, and email you a receipt.
• Event giving enquiries. Your name, email address, phone number (optional) and message, so we can follow up about giving to an event.
• Staff and admin accounts. Name, email address, a hashed password, and a log of actions taken in the admin area, so we can keep the site secure and accountable.
• Email delivery information. When we send you an email, our email provider tells us whether it was delivered, bounced, opened or clicked. We use this to know whether our messages are reaching people.
• Technical information. Like any website, our hosting provider sees your IP address and browser details when you visit. We also use your IP address briefly to limit repeated form submissions and sign-in attempts, which protects the site from abuse.

Cookies and similar storage

We use a small number of cookies, all of them needed for the site to work. When you sign in, a secure cookie keeps you signed in (it cannot be read by scripts on the page). Your light or dark theme choice is stored in your browser. We do not use advertising or analytics cookies, and we do not track you across other websites.

To see how the site is used, we count page visits with Vercel Web Analytics. It uses no cookies and does not identify you: it records which page was viewed, the site you came from, your country and your type of device, and nothing that would let us tell one visitor from another.

Who handles your information

We do not sell your information. We share it only with the services that help us run the site, and only for that purpose:

• Vercel, which hosts the website.
• MongoDB Atlas, which stores our database (hosted in South Africa).
• Resend, which delivers our emails.
• Cloudinary, which stores uploaded photos.
• Pesapal, which processes online payments under its own privacy policy and terms.

We may also disclose information if the law requires it, or to protect the safety of people or the site.

How we protect it

The site is served over HTTPS. Passwords are hashed. Access to the admin area needs an account, and each staff account can only reach the sections it has been given. No system is perfectly secure, and we cannot promise that nothing will ever go wrong, but we take reasonable care and we fix problems when we find them.

How long we keep it

We keep information for as long as we need it for the reason you gave it to us. Records of gifts may be kept longer because we need them for our financial records. Volunteer accounts stay until you ask us to close them. If you unsubscribe from the newsletter, we stop emailing you.

Your choices

You can ask us what information we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it. You can also object to how we use it. Volunteers can update most of their details in their account settings. To make any of these requests, contact us using the details below. We may need to confirm who you are first. We follow Uganda's Data Protection and Privacy Act, 2019. If you are not happy with how we have handled your information, you can also contact Uganda's Personal Data Protection Office.

If you are under 18, please ask a parent or guardian before you create an account or make a gift.

Changes

If we change this policy we will update the date at the top of this page. If the change is significant, we will say so on the site.

Contact us

Email info@stacafrica.org, call +256 780 838 191, or use the contact page.