Privacy Policy

We collect personal information in only the contexts where the website needs it to do something specific for you. The categories below are exhaustive for searchngo.org as of the last-updated date in the hero.

Form submissions

• Contact form: name, email, phone, inquiry type, message, and your explicit consent to be contacted.
• Volunteer applications: full name, email, phone, city, areas of interest, available dates, and message.

Donation processing

When you donate we collect donor name, email, phone, and optional PAN (for the 80G receipt). Payment instrument details — card number, UPI ID, netbanking credentials — are entered on Razorpay’s hosted Checkout. SEARCH never sees or stores those details.

Cookies

We use a small number of cookies. Strictly necessary cookies (session, CSRF protection, consent banner state) are set by default; analytics cookies (GA4) are set only after you give explicit consent via the consent banner. We do not use advertising cookies and we do not participate in cross-site tracking.

Analytics

When loaded, Google Analytics 4 records page views, donation events, form submissions, and PDF downloads under our GA4 measurement ID. IPs are anonymised at ingestion. The analytics tag does not fire until the consent banner records acceptance.

Server logs

Standard request logs — IP address, user agent, timestamp, HTTP status, and the URL requested — are produced by our hosting provider for security and debugging. Logs are retained for 30 days and then discarded.

• Form data: to respond to your inquiry, and process volunteer applications.
• Donation data: to process the gift, issue 80G or FCRA receipts, and comply with statutory reporting requirements under Indian tax and foreign contribution law.
• Analytics: to understand which pages and content perform well so we can improve them. Never to identify individual visitors.
• Server logs: to troubleshoot issues, detect abuse, and protect SEARCH’s infrastructure.

We rely on a short list of vetted processors. Each one has a defined purpose, a defined slice of data we share, and its own privacy policy.

• Razorpay

  Purpose: Payment processing for donations.

  Data shared: Donor name, email, phone, and the payment instrument details (card, UPI, netbanking) entered on the Razorpay-hosted Checkout. SEARCH never sees or stores card or UPI credentials.

  Razorpay privacy policy

• Sanity.io

  Purpose: Content management and form-submission storage.

  Data shared: Form submissions (contact, volunteer) persist as `formSubmission` documents in our Sanity dataset.

  Sanity.io privacy policy

• Resend

  Purpose: Transactional email delivery.

  Data shared: Email addresses and message bodies for form-notification emails sent to SEARCH staff and acknowledgement emails sent to visitors.

  Resend privacy policy

• Cloudflare Turnstile

  Purpose: Anti-spam protection on forms.

  Data shared: Behavioural signals only (browser fingerprint, interaction patterns). No personally identifying form content is shared with Turnstile.

  Cloudflare Turnstile privacy policy

• Google Analytics 4

  Purpose: Website analytics, loaded only after explicit consent.

  Data shared: IP-anonymised page-view, donation, form-submission, and PDF-download events. No analytics tag fires until the consent banner records acceptance.

  Google Analytics 4 privacy policy

• Vercel

  Purpose: Application hosting and edge network.

  Data shared: Standard request logs (IP address, user agent, request URL, HTTP status, timestamp). Logs are subject to Vercel’s own privacy policy and rolling retention.

  Vercel privacy policy

Razorpay is a payment aggregator regulated by the Reserve Bank of India and operates under its own published privacy policy.

We group cookies into two categories.

• Strictly necessary: session cookies, CSRF protection, and the consent banner state cookie (which remembers your choice between visits). These cannot be turned off because the site needs them to function.
• Analytics: Google Analytics 4 cookies, gated by the consent banner. If you decline analytics, the GA4 tag never loads.

You can change your analytics choice at any time through the consent banner. Opt-outs take effect immediately.

We do not set advertising cookies, do not participate in cross-site tracking, and do not share data with third-party data brokers.

• Form submissions: retained for 24 months in Sanity, then anonymised. Replies sent from our email mailbox are kept according to our standard email retention.
• Donor records: retained as long as required by the Income Tax Act and FCRA reporting obligations — typically eight years for tax records.
• Server logs: 30 days.
• Analytics data: stored in Google Analytics 4 with a 14-month default retention window; data minimisation features are enabled.

Under the Indian Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023, SEARCH is a Data Fiduciary and visitors are Data Principals. You have the following rights:

• Access: ask what personal data we hold about you.
• Rectification: ask us to correct inaccurate or incomplete data.
• Erasure: ask us to delete data we no longer need to keep.
• Restriction: ask us to pause processing in specific circumstances.
• Objection: object to processing where our basis is legitimate interest.
• Portability: ask for a machine-readable export of your data.

To exercise any of these rights, write to info@searchngo.org with the subject “Data subject request”. We respond within 30 days.

SEARCH does not knowingly collect data from children under 18 through this website. Programmatic data about children — for example, school WASH programmes — is collected through partner schools with parental and institutional consent, and is governed by our programme data-handling protocols rather than this website privacy policy.

Several of our processors — Razorpay, Sanity, Resend, Cloudflare, Google Analytics, Vercel — operate globally. Where personal data is transferred outside India, we rely on the processor’s standard contractual safeguards. We do not use processors that cannot demonstrate an appropriate transfer mechanism.

We update this page when our practices change. Material changes are flagged at the top of the page for at least 60 days, and the last-updated date in the hero is refreshed at the same time. Editorial fixes (typos, broken links) do not bump the date.

For privacy questions or to exercise any of the rights listed above, email info@searchngo.org with the subject “Data subject request”. We respond within 30 days. You can also reach us through the contact form with inquiry type “General”.