Helping Church Leaders Lead

PRIVACY POLICY

Watermark Resources is a division of Watermark Community Church (Watermark), a nonprofit ministry. It is Watermark’s policy to respect your privacy regarding any information we may collect while operating our websites.

Guiding Principles

Your identity, unless you choose to reveal it to us, remains anonymous as a visitor to our websites. If you do reveal your identity to us, we use that information to respond to your request and/or provide you with ministry resources. We do not rent or sell it.

We do attempt to identify which website pages our guests visit and how they use them. The sole use of this information is to help us make our websites more usable and relevant to people who access them and to understand how people utilize our sites.

In order to do this, we utilize industry-standard statistical software that helps us track usage patterns. This software and related processes operate in a way that respects your privacy and allows you to remain anonymous, unless you choose to reveal your identity to us. In this document you will find a more detailed description of the safeguards we’ve instituted to guard your privacy while honoring your requests for service.

Website Visitors

Watermark’s purpose in collecting non–personally identifying information is to better understand how visitors use our websites.

As is true with most responsible website operators, Watermark collects non–personally identifying information of the sort that web browsers and servers typically make available, such as the browser type, language preference, referring site, and the date and time of each visitor request. From time to time, Watermark may release non–personally identifying information in the aggregate, e.g., by publishing a report on trends in the usage of its website.

Watermark also collects potentially personally identifying information like Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. This information is not used to identify its visitors and is not disclosed other than as described below. If a visitor chooses to use the location-search feature, Watermark may use an IP address to determine a visitor's location.

Aggregated Statistics

Watermark may collect statistics about the behavior of visitors to its websites. For instance, Watermark may monitor the most popular searches on its Find a Group search function.

Watermark may display statistical or behavioral information publicly or provide it to others. However, Watermark does not disclose personally identifying information other than as described below.

Cookies

A cookie is a string of information that a website stores on a visitor’s computer, which the visitor’s browser provides to the website each time the visitor returns. Watermark uses cookies to help serve visitors by identifying and tracking visitor usage of Watermark websites as well as their website access preferences. Watermark visitors who do not wish to have cookies placed on their computers should set their browsers to refuse cookies before using Watermark’s websites, with the drawback that certain features of Watermark’s websites may not function properly without the aid of cookies.

Gathering of Certain Personally Identifying Information

Certain visitors to Watermark’s websites choose to interact with Watermark in ways that require Watermark to gather personally identifying information. The amount and type of information that Watermark gathers depends on the nature of the interaction. For example, we ask visitors who sign up for email communication to provide their first name, email address, and zip/postal code.

Those who engage in transactions with Watermark—by purchasing through our Watermark Resources Store, for example—are asked to provide additional information, including as necessary the personal and financial information required to process transactions.

In each case, Watermark collects only the information needed to fulfill the purpose of the visitor’s interaction with Watermark. Information collection, use, and storage are always secured using widely accepted modern technology.

Watermark does not disclose personally identifying information other than as described below. Visitors may always refuse to supply personally identifying information, with the caveat that it may limit their ability to benefit from certain Watermark website-related functionality.

Protection of Certain Personally Identifying Information

Watermark discloses potentially personally identifying information only to those of its employees, contractors, and affiliated organizations that (i) need to know that information in order to process it on Watermark’s behalf or to provide services available at Watermark’s websites, and (ii) have agreed not to disclose it to others.

Some of those employees, contractors, and affiliated organizations may be located outside of your home country; by using Watermark’s websites, you consent to their access to such information as Watermark operatives.

Watermark will not rent or sell potentially personally identifying information to anyone.

Other than to its employees, contractors, and affiliated organizations, as described in this document, Watermark discloses potentially personally identifying information only when required to do so by law, or when Watermark believes in good faith that disclosure is reasonably necessary to protect the property or rights of Watermark, third parties, or the public at large.

If you are a registered user of a Watermark website and have supplied your email address, you can expect to receive only Watermark or Watermark-related information. Watermark may occasionally send you email to tell you about new features, solicit your feedback or just keep you up to date with what’s going on with Watermark and ministry curriculum tools or opportunities. If you send us a request (for example via a support email or via one of our feedback mechanisms), we reserve the right to publish the request in order to help us clarify or respond to your request or to help us support other users. If at any time you would like to stop receiving email communication, simply click the “unsubscribe” links provided in the email message and follow the instructions to have your email removed from our communication.

Watermark uses modern technology as part of its procedures to reasonably protect against the unauthorized access, use, alteration, or destruction of potentially personally identifying information.

How We Use Your Personally Identifying Information

We also partner with third parties to provide advertising services that are targeted based on your online activities across websites, mobile apps, and devices over time (commonly referred to as “interest-based advertising”). Our advertising partners may collect information about your activities on our Services on your current device and combine it with information about your activities on other websites, mobile apps, and devices. They may collect such information using server logs, cookies, web beacons, tags, pixels, mobile advertising IDs (such as Facebook cookies or Google's Advertising ID), cross-device linking, and similar technologies.

For example, our advertising partners may use the fact that you visited our website to target advertising to you on other websites and mobile apps on your current device or on other devices you use. They may match your browsers or devices if you log into the same online service on multiple devices or if your devices share similar attributes that support an inference that they are used by the same person or household. This means that information about your activity on websites or apps on your current browser or device may be combined and used with information collected from your other browsers or devices.

Usage of Our Mailing Lists to Create As-Like Audiences via Facebook

We may share portions of your personally identifying information with marketing partners to make our business more responsive to your interests and/or those of like-minded consumers. For example, we may aggregate your email address together with the email addresses of others who facilitate a ministry or access ministry assets, and transmit this data to Facebook for the purpose of creating “Custom Audiences” (where targeted ads are sent to people on Facebook who have already been on our Site), and “Lookalike Audiences” (where targeted ads are sent to people on Facebook who have similar characteristics to people on our Custom Audience list).
If you wish to opt-out of this use of certain portions of your personally identifying information, please email us at resources@watermark.org, and we will begin the process of removing your data from our Custom Audience list.

Privacy Policy Changes

Although most changes are likely to be minor, Watermark may change its Privacy Policy from time to time and at Watermark’s sole discretion. Watermark encourages visitors to frequently check this page for any changes to its Privacy Policy. Your use of this site constitutes your acceptance of all site policies.