Privacy policy

Watershed Giving collects what federal election law requires us to collect about contributors, plus what we need to run your account and process your payment. Federal law requires us to report contributors to the Federal Election Commission (FEC), which makes those reports public. We do not sell your information, and we do not use it for advertising.

• Your identity as a contributor: full name, mailing address, employer and occupation. The FEC requires committees to ask for them. We keep each version exactly as you entered it; changing your profile later does not change what was reported for an earlier contribution.
• Your account: email address and, if you add one, mobile number, and any passkeys you register (we store only the public key).
• Your contributions: amounts, dates, the committees and elections each was earmarked for, the page and organization you used, and the statements you affirmed, with the time.
• Payment details: our payment processor collects your card. We receive and keep only a summary (card brand, last four digits, wallet type) and the processor's reference ids.
• Technical information: the IP address and browser user agent of each payment, kept to prevent fraud, and a record of each email and text we send you and whether it was delivered.
• Public FEC records: to show your contribution history and help you stay within limits, we look up contributions the FEC has published under your name and match them to you by name and address. A match can be wrong; you can remove one that is not yours. When you sign up, we may show you identities the FEC has published under the name you enter so you can pick yours.

• to process your payment, earmark and forward your contributions and send your receipt;
• to meet our legal obligations: reporting to the FEC, applying contribution limits and keeping records;
• to sign you in and keep your account secure;
• to prevent fraud and prohibited contributions, and to answer your questions.

We only send messages you need: sign-in and verification codes, and receipts. We do not send marketing.

• The FEC and the public. Watershed Giving reports earmarked contributions to the FEC with the contributor's name, address, employer and occupation, as federal law requires, and may report contributions of any amount. The FEC publishes these reports. Federal law prohibits anyone from using contributor information from FEC reports to solicit contributions or for commercial purposes.
• The committees you contribute to receive your contribution together with your name, address, employer and occupation, which they need for their own reports.
• The organizations whose pages you used see, in their console, your email address, phone number, name, address, employer and occupation, the contributions you made through their pages, and where you stand against each limit across all sources, including FEC records matched to you. They see nothing about you unless you contributed through one of their pages, and they may not use FEC-sourced information to solicit contributions or for commercial purposes.
• Service providers that run the site for us under contract and may use your information only to provide their service: Cloudflare (hosting), Neon (database), Stripe (card payments), Resend (email) and Twilio (text messages). The site loads its typeface from Google Fonts, which receives your IP address.
• Authorities when the law requires it, or to protect the site, our contributors or the public from fraud or harm.

We do not sell or rent contributor information to anyone, and we do not give your email address or phone number to the committees you contribute to, or to any organization other than one whose page you gave through, without your consent.

We set three cookies, all needed to run the site: one keeps you signed in, one carries your sign-in across the websites of organizations that use Watershed Giving, and one remembers that we offered you a passkey. On a contribution page, Stripe's card form sets its own cookies to detect fraud. We use no advertising or analytics cookies and no tracking pixels.

Federal law requires political committees to keep contribution records for at least three years after the report that discloses them is filed, so we keep contribution, identity and payment records for at least that long. Records of messages and sign-in attempts are kept only as long as we need them to run and secure the service.

• You can see your contributions and update your profile and contact details in your account.
• You can remove FEC matches that are not yours.
• You can ask us for a copy of your information, to correct it or to close your account. We will close the account and delete what we are not required to keep; reported contributions and their records must stay for the period described above, and contributions already reported to the FEC remain in its public records.

Information is encrypted in transit and stored with providers that encrypt it at rest. Sign-in uses one-time codes or passkeys, not passwords. No system is perfectly secure; if we learn of a breach affecting your information we will tell you as the law requires.

The site is for people 18 and older, and we do not knowingly collect information from anyone younger.

We will post changes here and update the date at the top. Our terms also apply. For a privacy question or request, write to the mailing address on Watershed Giving's Statement of Organization at the FEC.