Privacy policy.

Lighthouse Nonprofit Technologies Inc. is a California nonprofit public benefit corporation and a 501(c)(3) public charity, EIN 33-1494111. We build the technical and operational capacity of other nonprofits: fractional CTO leadership, development, AI strategy, workshops, secure hosting, and a free device and software access program.

This policy explains what personal information we collect, why we collect it, who sees it, and what control you have over it. We have tried to write it to be read.

This policy applies to three things:

• This website at https://lighthousent.org, including the grant application intake and the contact form.
• The Watch Room, our authenticated back office where staff and board members review applications and record governance decisions.
• Lighthouse internal business applications that connect to third-party services on our own behalf, including the QuickBooks Online accounting integration described in section 6.

It does not cover independent websites we link to. Systems we build, host, or operate for a partner nonprofit are controlled by that partner and governed by their privacy policy and our grant agreement with them; what we commit to when we work inside them is described in section 4.

Information you give us

The contact form asks for your name, email address, organization, and message. The grant application asks for more, and is described in section 4. If you email us, we keep the correspondence.

Information collected automatically

We use Vercel Analytics to measure page views and aggregate site performance. It does not set cookies, does not fingerprint visitors, and does not build a profile of you across other websites. Our hosting provider generates standard server logs (IP address, user agent, timestamp) for security and reliability.

Cookies

The public site sets no advertising or tracking cookies. One strictly necessary session cookie is set, and only when a Lighthouse staff member signs in to the Watch Room.

We do not sell personal information, we have never sold personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising.

What we collect and why

An application asks for your organization name, EIN, website, annual budget band, a contact name, email, and phone number, your mission, a description of what you need, how urgent it is, which services you are asking for, and optionally a supporting document. We use it to check eligibility, place your organization on our sliding-scale subsidy band, scope the work, and put the request to our board.

Who sees it

Lighthouse staff assigned to review it, and board members once it reaches a vote. Uploaded documents are stored in a private bucket that is not publicly readable and is retrieved only through short-lived signed links by authenticated staff.

What becomes part of the permanent record

When the board decides on a request, that decision is frozen into our official minutes: the organization name, the outcome, any fee reduction granted, and how each board member voted. This is deliberate. It is the governance record of a public charity and it is not editable after the fact.

Your contact details, your uploaded documents, and internal staff review notes are not part of that record and are not published.

Please do not send us information you would not want in an application file. If you need to share something sensitive, email us first and we will find a better route.

Data we handle inside a partner’s systems

Once an engagement starts we often work inside systems that hold the partner’s own data: their donors, customers, staff, and the people their programs serve. That data belongs to the partner, not to us. Our grant agreements commit us to access only what is reasonably necessary to do the work, never to sell or disclose it, to follow reasonable security practices, to notify the partner promptly of any unauthorized access we become aware of, and to return or destroy their data when the engagement ends.

If you are served by one of our partner organizations, that organization controls your information, not Lighthouse. Their privacy policy governs it, and a request about your data should go to them. They can involve us if they need to.

Hosted systems and sensitive data

Our secure hosting line runs systems on a partner’s behalf, including case management systems that hold sensitive information about the people they serve. Those environments carry encryption in transit and at rest, role-based access control, audit logging, tested backup and recovery, and vulnerability patching. Where a partner’s data is subject to HIPAA, we operate under a Business Associate Agreement or its contractual equivalent. We act on the partner’s instructions in these systems and do not use what is in them for our own purposes.

Donations are processed by Zeffy, a third-party donation platform. Your payment card or bank details go to Zeffy and its payment processors. Lighthouse never receives or stores your full card number.

We do retain your name, contact information, gift amount, and date. We need these to thank you, to give you the written substantiation the IRS requires for your deduction, and to keep accurate books.

Donated devices and equipment

We accept donated hardware for the technology access program. For those gifts we record the donor’s name and contact information and a description of the property. We do not assign a value to donated property. That is the donor’s responsibility, and gifts above certain thresholds may require IRS Form 8283 or, above $5,000, a qualified appraisal.

Data left on donated devices. A donated laptop or phone may still hold your files, saved accounts, and credentials. We securely erase storage before any device is refurbished or placed with another organization, and we do not read or retain what was on it. Please sign out of your accounts and back up anything you want to keep before handing a device over, because once it is wiped we cannot recover it for you.

Our donor privacy commitment

We do not sell, rent, trade, or otherwise share donor lists. Not with other nonprofits, not with list brokers, not with anyone. You may ask to be acknowledged anonymously, or to be removed from all mailings, at any time.

This section describes Lighthouse’s internal accounting integration with Intuit QuickBooks Online, and is the privacy disclosure referenced from that application’s Intuit listing.

It connects to our own books only

The application is authorized against a single QuickBooks Online company: the one belonging to Lighthouse Nonprofit Technologies Inc.. It is an internal tool. It is not offered to the public, not sold or licensed to anyone, and is not connected to any other organization’s QuickBooks company. We do not access, receive, or store the QuickBooks data of any client, grantee, donor, or other third party.

Who uses it

Authorized Lighthouse personnel only: the Executive Director, the Treasurer, and finance staff or contractors bound by a confidentiality obligation.

What it does

It reads our accounting records and prepares internal financial reporting: profit and loss statements, balance sheets, budget versus actual comparisons, cash position summaries, functional expense allocation across program, administrative, and fundraising categories, and the working papers behind our board reporting and our annual IRS Form 990.

What it reads

• Company profile and the chart of accounts.
• Classes and locations, which carry our functional expense split.
• Transactions: invoices, bills, payments, deposits, expenses, purchases, and journal entries.
• Vendor and customer records as they appear in the ledger.
• QuickBooks’ own report endpoints.

Personal information can appear in these records, for example the name of a contractor we pay or a donor who gave by check. It is handled under this policy like any other personal information we hold.

It does not write to the ledger

The integration reads accounting data and produces reports. It does not create, modify, or delete transactions. QuickBooks Online remains our system of record.

Credentials

Access uses Intuit’s OAuth 2.0. Tokens are held server-side on Lighthouse-controlled infrastructure, encrypted at rest, never exposed to a browser, and never committed to source control. No Intuit credential is embedded in this website.

We do not sell it, and it does not leave its purpose

Accounting data retrieved through the integration is used solely for Lighthouse’s internal financial management and statutory reporting. It is not sold, rented, licensed, used for advertising, or shared with any party except as described in section 8.

Disconnecting

The connection can be ended at any time from within QuickBooks Online, under Apps, or by contacting us. On disconnection we revoke the tokens and delete accounting data cached through the integration within 30 days, except where a copy must be retained as part of our books and records under section 10. See the disconnect page for what happens next.

The financial reporting application described in section 6 is an AI agent. It uses large language models to read our accounting data and draft the analysis in our internal financial reports. We would rather tell you that plainly than bury it.

• Data may be sent to a model provider. Accounting data may be transmitted to third-party AI model providers for processing. We use providers under commercial agreements that prohibit using our data to train their models, and we do not use consumer-grade services for this purpose.
• Its output is a draft. Every report is reviewed by a person before it goes to the board, to a funder, or into a filing.
• No automated decisions about people. This system makes no decision producing a legal or similarly significant effect on any individual.
• AI does not decide grants. Grant decisions are made by people, through a recorded board vote.

We share personal information only with:

• Service providers who run our infrastructure under contract and may only use the data to serve us. Today: Vercel (hosting and analytics), Supabase (database and file storage), Postmark (transactional email), Zeffy (donation processing), Intuit (QuickBooks Online), and the AI model provider described in section 7.
• Professional advisors, meaning our accountant, auditor, and legal counsel, under professional duties of confidentiality.
• Government, where required: our IRS Form 990, state charitable registration filings, and any lawful subpoena, court order, or regulatory request.
• Our board, for the governance decisions described in section 4.

We do not sell, rent, or trade personal information, and we do not share it with advertisers.

Some disclosure is not optional for a public charity. You should know what becomes public.

• Form 990 is a public document. We file an annual information return with the IRS. It is available from the IRS and from services such as GuideStar and ProPublica. It shows our finances, our largest contractors, and the compensation of officers and key employees.
• Donor names are not disclosed publicly. As a public charity, we are not required to report donor names and addresses to the IRS on Schedule B, and any donor detail that is reported is redacted from the copy made available for public inspection.
• Grantees may be named. We report the grants we make. We may name a grantee organization and the value of its award in the 990, in reports to funders, and in our public materials. We name organizations, not individuals, and we will ask you first before publishing a case study about your organization.
• Board minutes are a permanent record, as described in section 4.
• State filings.We file Form 199 with the California Franchise Tax Board, the annual RRF-1 renewal with the California Attorney General’s Registry of Charities and Fundraisers, and a Statement of Information with the California Secretary of State. The registry and Secretary of State filings are public.
• Related-party transactions are disclosed. Where a Lighthouse officer or director has an interest in a transaction, it is approved by disinterested directors under our conflict of interest policy and reported on the Form 990.

• Grant applications and the board decisions on them: permanently, as part of the corporate record.
• Accounting records, including data pulled through the QuickBooks integration and the reports built from it: at least seven years, the standard retention period for financial records supporting a tax filing.
• Donor records: at least seven years, for substantiation and audit.
• Contact form messages and general correspondence: up to three years.
• Staff session records: 30 days after expiry.
• Cached QuickBooks data after disconnection: deleted within 30 days, subject to the accounting retention above.

• Encryption in transit everywhere, and at rest for stored data.
• Row-level security on the database. The public can submit an application and nothing else. It cannot read applications back, not even its own.
• Uploaded documents live in a private bucket, unreadable without an authenticated, short-lived signed link.
• Back-office access requires an individual staff account with a server-side session we can revoke immediately. Passwords are salted and hashed, never stored in readable form.
• Secrets, including the Intuit credentials, are server-side only and are never shipped to a browser.
• Access follows least privilege and ends when a person’s role with Lighthouse ends.

No system is perfectly secure. If we discover a breach affecting your personal information, we will notify you and the appropriate authorities as California law requires.

You may ask us to:

• Tell you what personal information we hold about you.
• Correct it if it is wrong.
• Delete it, where we are not required to keep it.
• Give you a copy.
• Stop emailing you.

Email hello@lighthousent.org. We will respond within 30 days, and we will not treat you differently for asking.

A note on the law.California’s CCPA and CPRA apply by their terms to for-profit businesses, and Lighthouse is a nonprofit, so we sit outside their scope. We extend these rights to you anyway, because it is the right way to operate. If you are in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, we will honor equivalent access, correction, deletion, and objection requests.

What we cannot delete: records we must retain for tax, audit, or corporate governance reasons, including the board decisions in section 4 and the accounting records in section 10.

Our website and services are directed to nonprofit organizations and the adults who run them. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 13. If you believe a child has given us information, email us and we will delete it.

We will update this page when our practices change, and move the last updated date at the top. If a change materially affects how we handle information you have already given us, including any change to the scope of the QuickBooks integration in section 6, we will say so prominently here.

Questions, requests, or concerns about privacy: