Privacy policy

1. Personal information we collect

Depending on how you take part, we may collect:

• your name, email address, phone number, suburb and state;
• the school, organisation or community group you belong to, and your role in it;
• the details of a gift: the amount, how often you give, any message or dedication you add, and whether you want it kept anonymous;
• information about a site or project, such as a park or school you tell us about, your forest team and your plans;
• what you write in forms, applications, messages and emails to us;
• your choices about which updates you'd like from us;
• information about how you use our website and tools, such as pages visited, device and browser type, and the general area you visit from;
• information someone else gives us with your permission, such as a forest leader adding you to their team or a teacher adding a colleague.

Card details go straight to our payment provider, Stripe. We never see or keep your full card number.

We don't seek sensitive information, such as health information. If you give us some, we will handle it as the Privacy Act requires.

2. How we collect it

We collect personal information directly from you when you give, sign up to follow along, send an enquiry or expression of interest, apply to lead a microforest, download a lesson, use our park check or school map, join a forest team, or contact us.

We may also collect it from forest leaders, teachers and schools who add you to their project, from partners who introduce you to us with your permission, and from public records such as school and council directories.

You can choose not to give us personal information, but then we may not be able to process a gift, send a tax receipt or answer your enquiry.

3. Why we use it

We use personal information to:

• process gifts, issue tax receipts and annual giving statements, and manage monthly gifts you ask us to set up;
• thank you, and send you the updates you ask for;
• answer enquiries, and assess expressions of interest and applications from schools and local leaders;
• support forest teams, schools and teachers through Wayfinder, our project guide;
• keep financial records and meet our obligations as a registered charity with deductible gift recipient (DGR) status;
• understand how our website and tools are used, and improve them;
• plan our work, and report on it to our board, funders and partners in summary form;
• meet our legal obligations.

We use or share personal information for the purpose we collected it, for a related purpose you would reasonably expect, with your consent, or where the law requires or allows it.

4. What others can see

When you give to a community microforest, your name and any message you add appear on that forest's page and are visible to the forest's team, unless you ask for your gift to be anonymous. Your email address and other contact details stay with Microforest Collective.

If you tick to receive updates from a forest's team, we send their updates to you on their behalf. Their team doesn't receive your email address.

Leaders' and teachers' names may appear on their forest's page with their agreement.

5. Sharing with service providers and others

We may share personal information with:

• service providers who help us run our work: payment processing (Stripe), website hosting, file storage and bot protection (Cloudflare), our database (Neon), email delivery (Resend), email and documents (Google Workspace), accounting (Xero) and the AI service behind our Ask Wayfinder assistant (Anthropic);
• the forest team or school you give to or work with, as described above;
• partners, where you ask us to introduce you or give your consent;
• our professional advisers, auditors and insurers;
• government agencies, regulators and law enforcement where the law requires or allows it.

We don't sell personal information, and we don't share your contact details with advertisers.

We take reasonable steps to make sure our service providers handle personal information consistently with the Australian Privacy Principles.

6. Updates and fundraising messages

We send newsletters and fundraising messages only to people who have asked for them, or where the law otherwise allows it. Every message has an unsubscribe link, and you can also contact us to stop them.

Unsubscribing won't stop messages we need to send about something you've asked for, such as a receipt, a change to your monthly gift, or your forest project.

7. Cookies and analytics

Our public pages use Cloudflare Web Analytics, which counts visits without cookies and without identifying you. Project teams who sign in get a cookie that keeps them signed in. Our bot check (Cloudflare Turnstile) and embedded videos (YouTube's privacy-enhanced mode) may set their own technical cookies. Stripe sets its own cookies on its payment page.

You can control cookies in your browser settings. Turning some off may stop parts of the site working, such as signing in.

8. Overseas disclosure

Our database is hosted in Sydney. Some of our service providers store or process information overseas, mainly in the United States, and may access it from other countries for support. Where the Privacy Act requires it, we take reasonable steps to make sure overseas recipients handle personal information consistently with the Australian Privacy Principles, including choosing providers with strong security and privacy commitments and limiting what we share to what they need.

9. Automated tools and AI

Some of our tools work automatically. Our park check and school map use public data to suggest whether a site suits a microforest. Our readiness check tells a prospective leader whether they look ready, nearly there or not yet. Ask Wayfinder uses an AI service to answer project teams' questions.

These tools help people get started. They don't make final decisions about you: a person at Microforest Collective reads every application and expression of interest. You can ask us how a tool works, or for a person to review anything a tool told you.

10. Children and schools

Our website and giving pages are for adults. Our schools program works through teachers and schools. Students use our Forest Lab app under their teacher's supervision with a class code. We don't ask students for their names, email addresses or photos of people, and Forest Lab photos are of plants and wildlife only.

11. Security

We take reasonable technical and organisational steps to protect personal information from misuse, interference, loss and unauthorised access, change or disclosure. These include encrypted connections, access limited to the people who need it, and sign-in for anyone who works with project or donor records.

If an eligible data breach happens, we will notify the people affected and the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) as the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme requires.

12. How long we keep it

We keep personal information only as long as we need it for the purposes above, or as the law requires.

• Gift, receipt and other financial records are kept for at least seven years, to meet tax and charity record-keeping rules.
• Enquiries and expressions of interest that don't go further are deleted or de-identified within 24 months of our last contact.
• If you unsubscribe, we keep your email address on a do-not-contact list so we don't email you again.

When we no longer need personal information, we take reasonable steps to delete it or de-identify it.

13. Access and correction

You can ask for a copy of the personal information we hold about you, or ask us to correct it. Monthly donors can also update their details, change or stop their gift at any time from the link in their receipt. We won't charge you for a request, and we'll respond within a reasonable time, as the Privacy Act requires.

14. Anonymity

Where it's lawful and practical, you can deal with us without giving your name, such as when browsing the site or using the park check. We need your name and email to process a gift and send a tax receipt, but you can ask for your gift to be shown as anonymous.

15. Questions and complaints

If you have a question, or think we've mishandled your personal information, email our Privacy Officer at hello@microforestcollective.org. We will look into it and reply within a reasonable time.

If you're not satisfied with our response, you can contact the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner at oaic.gov.au or on 1300 363 992.

16. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy as our work, tools or legal obligations change. The current version is always on this page, with the date it took effect.