Privacy Policy

Information Collection & Use

Registration
In order to use http://www.hcfconnections.org, http://symposiums.hispanicyouth.org, http://scholarships.hispanicfund.org, www.hispanicfund.org, and www.hispanicyouth.org you must first complete the registration forms and create your logins and passwords. During registration you are required to give contact information (such as name and email address) and some academic information (school, GPA and field of study). If applying for scholarships you will be required to give your social security number during registration. The information we collect is used to contact you about our programs, give you the targeted information you need to apply for our programs or access to the resources available on our websites.

The Hispanic College Fund (HCF) is the sole owner of the information collected on http://www.hcfconnections.org, http://symposiums.hispanicyouth.org, http://scholarships.hispanicfund.org, www.hispanicfund.org, and www.hispanicyouth.org. HCF collects personally identifiable information from our users at several different points on our Web sites.

Donations
If you make an online donation to us, we request certain personally identifiable information from you on our donation forms. You must provide contact information (such as name, email, and address) and financial information (such as credit card number, expiration date).

We use this information for billing purposes and to fill your orders. If we have trouble processing an order, we will use this information to contact you.

We will use your name and email address to send our newsletter and other emails to you. Out of respect for your privacy, we provide you a way to unsubscribe. Please see the “Email Preferences” section.

We will use your name to publicize your donation on our marketing materials, including our website, brochures, annual reports and other programs. You can choose to make your donation anonymously in which case we will not disclose your name on any marketing materials.

Application Forms
If you apply to participate in a program or for a scholarship on our site, we require that you provide certain personally identifiable information, including your name, address, phone number, social security number. This information is necessary to process your application and to contact you.

Social Security Numbers
We require your social security number if you are applying for some of our programs. When you enter your social security number on our application registration, we encrypt it using secure socket layer technology (SSL).

Surveys or Contests
We may provide you the opportunity to participate in contests or surveys on our site. If you participate, we will request certain personally identifiable information from you. Participation in these surveys or contests is completely voluntary and you therefore have a choice whether or not to disclose this information. The requested information typically includes contact information (such as name and shipping address), and demographic information (such as zip code).

We use this information to personalize the site, collect data to report on the current status of participants in our programs and contact raffle or contest winners. We will not share the personally identifiable information you provide through a contest or survey with third parties unless we give you prior notice and choice.
Uses of Information
Personally identifiable information on our sites is used for the processing of scholarship and program participation applications on http://scholarships.hispanicfund.org and http://symposiums.hispanicyouth.org. On http://www.hcfconnections.org personally identifiable information can be submitted to share with other participants in HCF programs including students, alumni, sponsors, non-profit partners and volunteers.

If you have accepted an academic scholarship from the Hispanic College Fund or participated in the Hispanic Youth Symposium you will be required to agree to a release of some personally identifiable information which is specified in a release form. HCF can contact you regarding internship and full-time job opportunities, use the information you submitted (including photos) for the purposes of promoting HCF programs and publish your name and academic information on our websites and other marketing materials. HCF will never share social security numbers or personally identifiable information about your or your family’s income.

Aggregate information is used to measure the results of our programs and in reports made public for donors and prospective donors.

Kids and Privacy
For children under 14 who visit our sites, special rules apply. We do not request personal information submitted about children, such as first and last name or street address and city. When we become aware that a child under 14 has sent us an email, their online contact information (email address) is used to notify them that they cannot create a profile on our sites. Their contact information is not maintained in retrievable form.

Communications from the Site

Email Updates
We will occasionally send you information on our programs and other academic and career development programs. Out of respect for your privacy, we present the option not to receive these types of communications. Please see the “Email Preferences” page.

Newsletters
If you wish to subscribe to our newsletters, we will use your name and email address to send the newsletter to you. Out of respect for your privacy, we provide you a way to unsubscribe. Please see the “Email Preferences” page.

Program Related Announcements
If you are applying to or a current participant in one of our programs, we will send you program-related announcements when it is necessary to do so. For instance, if you are applying for scholarships and we require an additional document we will email or call you. If you are applying for the Hispanic Youth Symposium you will be contacted regarding transportation information, required paperwork and other items required for full participation in the program.

Generally, you may not opt-out of these communications, which are not promotional in nature. If you do not wish to receive them, you have the option to withdraw your application, decline participation in our programs and deactivate your account.

Constituent Services
Based upon the personally identifiable information you provide us, we will send you a welcoming email to verify your username and password. We will also communicate with you in response to your inquiries, to provide the information you request, and to manage your account. We will communicate with you by email or telephone, in accordance with your wishes.

Profile
We do not store information that we collect through cookies, log files, clear gifs, and/or third party sources to create a “profile” of your preferences.

We will tie your personally identifiable information, or your giving history, to information in the profile, in order to provide tailored information and opportunities to improve the content of the site for you.

We share your profile with other third parties. We share your profile on http://www.hcfconnections.org together with your personally identifiable information with other users on the www.hcfconnections.org website. You have the option to keep parts or all of your profile private by specifying your privacy preferences when you create or update your profile. If you create a profile for http://scholarships.hispanicfund.org or http://symposiums.hispanicyouth.org/ we share your profile, but not your contact or income information except to certain program partners described in the section on Personally Idenitifiable Information below.

Supplementation of Information
We do not use supplemental information from third parties.

Information Sharing and Disclosure

Aggregate Information (non-personally identifiable)
We share aggregated demographic information about our program participants with the public on our Web sites, marketing materials and reports. This information does not identify individual users. We do not link aggregate user data with personally identifiable information.

Personally Identifiable Information
We Share Personally Identifiable Information with the following third parties:

Application Reviewers
If applying to HCF programs including the HCF Scholarship Program, the Hispanic Young Professionals Program, and the Hispanic Youth Symposia - Pathways programs, all information submitted excluding contact (phone, email and address), family, and income information will be viewed by volunteers recruited by the Hispanic College Fund. Reviewers will have access to the application essay and resume and will be able to view any personally identifiable information contained within those documents. Reviewers agree not to keep or download any personally identifiable information they are given to review.

Program Volunteers
If applying or accepted to the Hispanic Youth Symposium program your name and contact information will be shared with volunteers who will contact you regarding transportation information, required paperwork and other items required for full participation in the program. Volunteers agree not to keep or share your contact information with any other persons or third parties.

Program Partners
If applying to the Latinos on the Fast Track (LOFT) Program or to the HCF scholarship program personally identifiable information excluding income information may be shared with HCF’s partner organization, the Hispanic Heritage Awards Foundation. Hispanic Heritage Awards Foundation is a 501(c)(3) charitable organization. More information about them can be found at www.hispanicheritage.org. Hispanic Heritage Awards will use this information to recruit participants for the LOFT program through emails, phone calls and newsletters. HCF requires that the Hispanic Heritage Awards Foundation not share any personally identifiable information of applicants with any of its partners. When applying for the HCF Scholarship program you may choose to opt out of LOFT in which case we will not share your information with the Hispanic Heritage Awards Foundation.

If a participant in the Hispanic Youth Symposia programs, personally identifiable information (contact and academic information) will be shared with our university partners, the educational institutions which participated in the program. This information can be used by the universities to contact you with information about their institution and the programs they offer. In some cases, a program donor or partner may sponsor a grant, honor or scholarship which is awarded at the Hispanic Youth Symposium. Contact and profile information of the winners of such awards will be given to the donating company or agency. Sponsors, donors and partners of the Hispanic Youth Symposium are not given any personally identifiable information of program participants except in the cases described above.

Scholarship Sponsors
If accepting an offer from HCF for an academic scholarship, you must agree to release some personally identifiable information (contact information, academic information and application materials) to the company, organization or individual identified as your “scholarship sponsor” and you must release your name, city, state, university, field of study and Grade Point Average to be made public in promotional materials and on HCF Web sites. Your scholarship sponsor can use your information to contact you about internship opportunities at their company, job openings at their company or other programs related to academic or professional development. Sponsors or partners who are not your scholarship sponsor may receive your contact and personal information only if HCF requests and receives your permission.

Third parties are prohibited from using your personally identifiable information for any other purpose than in the scenarios described above.

HCF Connections Users

User Profile information including members’ pictures and first names are displayed in directories on http://www.hcfconnections.org in order to facilitate user interaction in the hcfconnections.org online community. Only users who have been confirmed as current or past HCF scholarship recipients, current or past Hispanic Youth Symposium participants, current or past Latinos on the Fast Track interns, or professionals who are participating as student mentors will be given permission to view user profiles or other personally identifiable information. Users have the option to keep all personally identifiable information private when creating profiles and personal pages.

Legal Disclaimer
We reserve the right to disclose your personally identifiable information as required by law and when we believe that disclosure is necessary to protect our rights and/or to comply with a judicial proceeding, court order, or legal process served on our Web site.

Choice/Opt-out

We provide you the opportunity to “opt-out” of having your personally identifiable information used for certain purposes, when we ask for this information.

If you no longer wish to receive our newsletter and other general communications, you may opt-out of receiving them by following the instructions included in each newsletter or communication or by clicking on the link for “Email Preferences.”We offer an opportunity to opt-out of certain communications on our email preferences page on http://www.hcfconnections.org. If you are receiving communications about program applications such as the scholarship or Hispanic Youth Symposia applications, you may contact us at 1-800-644-4223 or hcf-info@hispanicfund.org to opt-out.

In some cases there may be opportunities for you to participate in other scholarships, internships or youth programs. If we identify you as a candidate we will offer you the opportunity to decline participation in the program opportunity.

Log Files

As is true of most Web sites, we gather certain information automatically and store it in log files. This information includes internet protocol (IP) addresses, browser type, internet service provider (ISP), referring/exit pages, operating system, date/time stamp, and clickstream data.

We use this information, which does not identify individual users, to analyze trends, to administer the site, to track users’ movements around the site and to gather demographic information about our user base as a whole.

We do not link this automatically-collected data to personally identifiable information.

We use a third-party tracking service called Google Analytics and AWStats that may use cookies to track non-personally identifiable information about visitors to our site in the aggregate which may capture non-personal information such as browser type, referring/exit pages, operating system, and geographic location to help us gain a better understanding of our audience and to aid us in gathering the results of our overall marketing strategy.

Cookies

A cookie is a small text file that is stored on a user’s computer for record-keeping purposes. We use cookies on this site.

The statistics software we primarily use, Google Analytics, is the only cookie-based system used on this web site. We do not link the information we store in cookies to any personally identifiable information you submit while on our site. Some of our business partners (e.g., advertisers) may use cookies on their site. We have no access to or control over these cookies.

This privacy statement covers the use of cookies by http://www.hcfconnections.org, http://symposiums.hispanicyouth.org, http://scholarships.hispanicfund.org, www.hispanicfund.org, and www.hispanicyouth.org only and does not cover the use of cookies by any advertisers.

We use session ID cookies. We use session cookies to make it easier for you to navigate our site. A session ID cookie expires when you close your browser.

If you reject cookies, you may still use our site, but your ability to use some areas of our site, such as contests or surveys, will be limited.

Third Party Advertisers

We do not use third party advertisers.

Links to Other Sites

This Web site contains links to other sites that are not owned or controlled by The Hispanic College Fund. Please be aware that we, Hispanic College Fund are not responsible for the privacy practices of such other sites.

We encourage you to be aware when you leave our site and to read the privacy statements of each and every Web site that collects personally identifiable information.

This privacy statement applies only to information collected by web sites owned and operated by HCF.

Bulletin Boards/Chat Rooms

If you use a bulletin board, job board or chat room on http://www.hcfconnections.org, you should be aware that any personally identifiable information you submit there can be read, collected, or used by other users of these forums, and could be used to send you unsolicited messages. We are not responsible for the personally identifiable information you choose to submit in these forums.

Hispanic College Fund reserves the right to terminate the account of a visitor who uses the http://www.hcfconnections.org, http://symposiums.hispanicyouth.org/ or the http://scholarships.hispanicfund.org web sites inappropriately.

Access to Personally Identifiable Information

If your personally identifiable information changes, or if you no longer desire our service, you may correct, update, delete or deactivate it by making the change on your profile on http://www.hcfconnections.org if you have one or by emailing our staff at hcf-info@hispanicfund.org or by contacting us by telephone at 1-800-644-4223.

Security

The security of your personal information is important to us. When you enter sensitive information (such as credit card number and/or social security number) on our registration or order forms, we encrypt that information using secure socket layer technology (SSL). To learn more about SSL, click here.

We follow generally accepted industry standards to protect the personal information submitted to us, both during transmission and once we receive it. No method of transmission over the Internet, or method of electronic storage, is 100% secure, however. Therefore, while we strive to use commercially acceptable means to protect your personal information, we cannot guarantee its absolute security.

If you have any questions about security on our Web site, you can send email us at hcf-info@hispanicfund.org.

Business Transitions

In the event Hispanic College Fund goes through a business transition, such as a merger, acquisition by another company, or sale of all or a portion of its assets, your personally identifiable information will likely be among the assets transferred. You will be notified via email and prominent notice on our Web site for 30 days of any such change in ownership or control of your personal information.

Changes in this Privacy Statement

If we decide to change our privacy policy, we will post those changes to this privacy statement, the homepage, and other places we deem appropriate so that you are aware of what information we collect, how we use it, and under what circumstances, if any, we disclose it.

We reserve the right to modify this privacy statement at any time, so please review it frequently. If we make material changes to this policy, we will notify you here, by email, or by means of a notice on our home page.

Contact Us

If you have any questions or suggestions regarding our privacy policy, please contact us at:
Phone: 1-800-644-4223
Fax: 202-296-3774
Email Address: hcf-info@hispanicfund.org
Postal Address: Hispanic College Fund, 1301 K Street NW, Suite 450-A West, Washington, DC 20005

Privacy Policy