Privacy Policy

Churches using PillarAid act as Data Controllers: they determine what personal data is collected about their members and how it is used. PillarAid acts as a Data Processor, processing data only on the church's instructions and solely to provide the Service.

• Churches decide what data to collect, how it is used, and are responsible for ensuring lawful collection.
• PillarAid processes data only as necessary to deliver and improve the Service.
• Church members should contact their church administrator for most privacy requests. For platform-level requests, contact us directly.

If you are a church administrator, you are responsible for providing appropriate privacy notices to your members and obtaining necessary consents where required by law.

We collect information you provide directly, data generated automatically by your use of the Service, and information from third-party integrations you enable:

We use the information we collect to:

• Provide, operate, and maintain the Service for churches and their members.
• Process donations, issue receipts, and generate tax reports via integrated payment providers.
• Send church communications (email, SMS) and Service notifications.
• Improve platform performance, security, reliability, and feature development.
• Comply with legal obligations and prevent fraud, abuse, or security threats.
• Provide customer support and respond to your inquiries.

We process personal data based on the following legal grounds:

• Contract: Account creation, billing, and delivering the Service as agreed.
• Legitimate Interests: Fraud prevention, security monitoring, platform analytics, and product improvements.
• Consent: Optional marketing communications and features where consent is required by law. You can withdraw consent at any time.
• Legal Obligation: Compliance with applicable laws, regulations, and legal requests.

We collect and retain only the data necessary to provide the Service. We encourage churches to regularly review and update their member data to maintain accuracy.

Church administrators are responsible for keeping member information accurate and up to date. We provide tools within the platform to facilitate data management, export, and deletion.

We use trusted third-party vendors to deliver infrastructure, payments, and communications. We only share the minimum data necessary to provide the Service:

• Payment Processors (e.g., Stripe, Paystack): for processing donations and subscriptions.
• Email/SMS Providers: for sending church communications and transactional messages.
• Cloud Hosting: for secure data storage and computing infrastructure.
• Analytics Services: for aggregated usage insights and performance monitoring.
• Advertising Partners (Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn, X, Reddit): only with your consent, and only the limited conversion information described in Cookies and Tracking. Church and member data is never shared with them.

We maintain a list of subprocessors and will provide updates on request. We may disclose data if required by law, to protect our rights, or to respond to valid legal requests from competent authorities.

We retain data for as long as your account is active or as needed to provide the Service. Our retention practices:

• Active accounts: Data is retained while your subscription is active.
• Cancelled accounts: You have a limited window (typically 30 days) to export your data after cancellation. After that, data is deleted or anonymized.
• Backups: Encrypted backups may persist for a limited additional period before final purge.
• Legal holds: Retention may be extended if required to comply with legal obligations or to resolve disputes.

We implement industry-standard security measures to protect your data:

No security system is perfect. If you believe your account has been compromised or you discover a vulnerability, please contact us immediately at support@pillaraid.com.

Data may be processed in regions outside your country, including the United States and the European Union. When we transfer data across borders, we ensure appropriate safeguards are in place, including:

• Contractual protections (e.g., Standard Contractual Clauses) with our subprocessors.
• Compliance with applicable data protection frameworks and regulations.
• Technical security controls applied consistently across all regions.

Depending on your location and applicable law, you may have the following rights regarding your personal data:

Church administrators can exercise these rights for member data directly within the platform. Individual members should contact their church administrator first. For additional assistance, contact us using the details below.

We may require identity verification before fulfilling requests to protect your privacy and security.

The Service may be used by churches to store data about minors (e.g., youth group members, Sunday school attendees). Churches are solely responsible for:

• Obtaining proper parental or guardian consent where required by law (e.g., COPPA, GDPR).
• Ensuring all data submitted about minors is collected and processed in compliance with applicable child protection laws.
• Handling sensitive data categories (e.g., health, religious affiliation) with appropriate care and legal basis.

PillarAid does not knowingly collect personal information directly from children under 13 without parental consent.

We use cookies and similar technologies on pillaraid.com and in the Service. Only essential cookies are set until you make a choice in the cookie banner, and you can change it at any time with the "Cookie settings" link at the bottom of every page. We keep your choice for six months and then ask you again.

• Essential Cookies: Login sessions, security tokens, CSRF protection and your cookie choice. These are strictly necessary and cannot be disabled.
• Analytics Cookies (optional): Google Analytics, to understand how our website is used, and a first-party cookie that remembers which campaign (for example an ad or a newsletter link) brought you to PillarAid, kept for 90 days.
• Advertising Cookies (optional): Pixels from Meta (Facebook and Instagram), TikTok, LinkedIn, X and Reddit on our marketing pages, so we can measure our ads and show PillarAid to people who visited our website.
• Preference Cookies: Remember your UI settings, language preferences, and localization.

What advertising partners receive. Only if you accept advertising cookies, and only about the person evaluating or buying PillarAid: that you visited our website, booked a demo or contacted us, started a free trial, started checkout or subscribed, with the plan price for a subscription. When you sign up or contact us we also send these partners a one-way (SHA-256) hash of your email address, your IP address and browser, and the ad click identifier, so they can match the result to their ad. We never send them your password, payment details, or anything about your church's members, giving, attendance or faith, and advertising tags never run inside the PillarAid app or on your church's public pages (member sign-up, event pages).

You can withdraw consent at any time through "Cookie settings"; we then stop loading these tags and delete the campaign cookie. You can also manage cookies in your browser settings. Disabling essential cookies may affect your ability to use the Service.

PillarAid offers an optional "Connect a Google Form" integration. If a church administrator chooses to connect it, PillarAid can read the responses your church collects through your own Google Form (stored by Google as a Google Sheet) and bring them into PillarAid as member and pledge records. This section describes exactly what Google data PillarAid accesses, how we use it, and how to disconnect. It applies only to churches that connect Google; if you never connect Google, none of it applies to you.

What we access. When you connect Google, you grant PillarAid read-only access to:

• Your Google account email address — shown in PillarAid so you can confirm which Google account is connected.
• The names of the spreadsheets in your Google Drive — so you can pick which spreadsheet holds your form responses. We see only each file's name and identifier; we do not read the contents of any other file in your Drive.
• The contents of the one spreadsheet and tab you select — the form responses that PillarAid imports as members and pledges.

Read-only — nothing is written back. All access is read-only. PillarAid never creates, edits, deletes, or writes anything to your Google Sheets, Google Forms, or Google Drive.

How we use it. The rows you choose are imported into your PillarAid account as member and pledge records and are then protected like any other member data described in this policy. We do not use Google data for advertising, for training general-purpose AI models, or for any purpose other than providing this import feature, and we never sell it or share it with advertising partners.

How it is stored and secured. To keep the connection working we store an encrypted Google refresh token (AES-256-GCM) together with the connected account's email address and your chosen spreadsheet and tab. The token is encrypted at rest, stays on our servers, is never exposed to your browser, and is used only to read the sheet you selected. Access is limited to authorized staff of your church who hold the relevant giving permissions.

Disconnecting and retention.

• You can disconnect at any time in PillarAid at Giving → Pledges → Google Form → Disconnect. This revokes PillarAid's access at Google and deletes the stored token.
• You can also remove PillarAid's access directly from your Google Account at myaccount.google.com/permissions.
• If your church account is deleted, the stored Google connection and token are deleted along with it. We recommend you also remove PillarAid's access from your Google Account using the link above.
• Member and pledge records already imported from Google are kept under the Data Retention terms above, and can be exported or deleted from within PillarAid at any time.

Some features of the Service use automated processing and artificial intelligence to generate summaries, insights, suggestions, or administrative assistance. Important details:

• AI outputs are advisory in nature and should always be reviewed by church administrators before taking action.
• AI features may process your data to generate results, but we do not use customer content to train general-purpose AI models without explicit consent.
• You can disable AI-powered features in your account settings at any time.

We log access and system activity to maintain the security, integrity, and reliability of the Service. Logged information may include:

• IP addresses and geolocation data.
• Browser, device, and operating system information.
• Activity timestamps and action types.
• Error logs and performance metrics.

These logs are used for security monitoring, incident investigation, abuse prevention, and system diagnostics. Logs are retained for a limited period and are accessible only to authorized personnel.

If your church uses WhatsApp messaging through the Service, we process the following data to send and receive those messages on the church's behalf:

• Recipients' phone numbers.
• Message content.
• Delivery and read status.
• WhatsApp Business Account and phone number identifiers (IDs).

WhatsApp messages are delivered through Meta. This data is also processed by Meta, as the messaging provider, under Meta's own terms and privacy policy in addition to this Policy.

We only access a church's WhatsApp account after the church authorizes the connection, and the church can disconnect it at any time. Disconnecting stops all WhatsApp messaging for that church.

To delete your account or stop WhatsApp messaging, see pillaraid.com/delete-account. For privacy questions about WhatsApp data, contact privacy@pillaraid.com.

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time to reflect changes in our practices, the Service, or applicable laws. If we make material changes, we will notify you through the Service or by email at least 30 days before the changes take effect.

Your continued use of the Service after the effective date of any changes constitutes your acceptance of the updated Privacy Policy. We encourage you to review this page periodically for the latest information.