Privacy Policy

Our privacy policy was recently updated! Please read below for more details.

This website, https://cacalls.org (the “Site”) is operated by the California Calls Education Fund (“We” or “Us”). We work hard to protect your privacy. We treat your privacy as we do our own. We wrote this privacy policy to let you know how we treat your personal information and show you all of the ways we keep it safe and private. The site is intended for users in the United States only.

California Calls staff, vendors, or volunteers may contact you by email, postal mail, phone, SMS text message, and other electronic means. We may share your personal information with the following groups (“Affiliated Groups”):

  • California Calls Action Fund, our sister organization, a 501(c)(4) affiliate organization
  • California Calls Education Fund, our 501(c)(3) affiliate organization
  • We Are California, A special project of the California Calls Education Fund
  • Vendors– we may share personal information with companies or individuals we hire to provide services or perform business functions on our behalf (such as print, mail, texting, or email vendors; web hosting vendors; and consultants) because these vendors need access to the personal information to perform the functions we have requested of them. These vendors are contractually required to treat any personal information we provide as confidential, and to use the personal information only to provide the services we have requested they perform on our behalf.
  • Affiliated third parties—for example, our database administrators, organizations that provide extra capacity at an urgent time, and organizations we engage to facilitate large distribution of messages 

These groups will not share your personal information or use it for any purpose other than as instructed by us. All above categories exclude text messaging originator opt-in data and consent; this information will not be shared with any third parties.

In addition, to grow and maintain a strong membership base while controlling costs and reaching the widest possible audience, we sometimes allow other unaffiliated progressive organizations and campaigns (“Unaffiliated Groups”) to contact by mail individuals who have chosen to share their information with Us. In order to protect your privacy, we do this through secure arrangements in which the unaffiliated group does not directly receive any personal information. The unaffiliated group learns information about you only if you choose to respond to that third-party communication.  

With your explicit permission and participation, information is shared with the following individuals and groups when you participate in certain of our activities:

  • The president, legislators, and news publications and other advocacy targetswhen you choose to use our email tool to send them messages
  • The president, legislators, news publications, other advocacy targets and the general publicwhen you sign petitions or complete surveys addressed to specific individuals and groups

Under circumstances where we determine that members may be misusing our systems for malicious purposes (for example, using the phone numbers we provide to make harassing phone calls), such activities may be reported to law enforcement agencies. In such cases, California Calls may release personally identifiable information, including name and address, to those agencies.

Please review this privacy policy periodically because we modify it from time to time. This privacy policy was last revised on January 22, 2025. Each time you visit this site or provide Us with information through the site, you are accepting practices described in the privacy policy in effect at that time. You are also accepting our specific rules or terms of use which may be posted on specific sections of the site, including areas for making donations, signing petitions or sending emails, and taking part in our photo campaigns.

This privacy policy applies only to transactions and activities in which you engage and data which is gathered on the site. This privacy policy does not apply to (i) any other website; (ii) any offline contact between California Calls or its affiliated groups, and any other entity; (iii) offline contact between you and California Calls or its affiliated groups; and (iv) any contact between you and unaffiliated groups.

California Calls does not collect or maintain any personal data from any person not resident in the U.S. or in U.S. territories or possessions. Thus California Calls does not collect or maintain any personal data from any European Union data subjects within the meaning of the General Data Protection Regulation.

If you believe that California Calls has collected personal data from you and want it to be deleted, please contact California Calls at the contact link provided at the end of this privacy policy, and California Calls will remove such data from our records and contact you to confirm that has been done.

Sharing of Information between California Calls 

California Calls Action Fund is a 501(c)(4) organization that primarily focuses on nonpartisan education and advocacy on important national issues. California Calls Education Fund and California Calls Action Fund are separate organizations. However, they’re both interested in promoting your participation in the democratic process. As such, when you provide your personal information to California Calls Education Fund , we share it with California Calls Action Fund, with the exception of credit card information with which you may provide Us in order to make a donation. Please see the “Financial Donations” section below for more information about donations.

Petitions and Surveys

You may visit the Site and review some of its contents without providing any personal information to California Calls. To create or sign a petition, to make comments, or to upload content, such as photographs, on California Calls Education Fund’s petition website, you will be asked to become a member of the site (“Member”) and provide information, including but not limited to, your first name, last name, zip code, phone number, and email address (“Personal Information”).

For petitions and surveys you’ve signed, created, or completed, we treat your name, city, state, and comments as public information (“Public Petition Information”). For example, we may provide compilations of petitions, with your comments, to the president and legislators, other petition targets, or the press. We will not make your street address publicly available, but we may transmit it to your petition targets as part of a petition. This is a standard industry practice in such situations. In no such case will we disclose your email address or phone number without your permission. We may also make your comments, along with your first name, last initial, city, and state available online.

Your personal information will be shared with California Calls Action Fund and We Are California (“California Calls Entities”), but only the public petition information will be available to the public.

If you become a member, California Calls may send you updates about the site and about any petition you created or signed by email, postal mail, phone, text message, and other electronic means. If you sign a petition on the site, you may also receive emails from the creator of that petition (“Petitioner”). You can remove yourself from California Calls mailing lists at any time by following the instructions contained in email communications you receive from us.

If you have expressed a desire to participate in the activities on the site, you may be contacted by phone or text message to coordinate your participation with California Calls’s petition website or other California Calls activities. Unless you provide it directly, no petitioner will have access to your information.

Sending Emails Via California Calls organizations

In certain cases, we enable you to send individual emails to the president, legislators, and other petition targets, as well as letters to the editors of news publications, through our website. These messages are sent in your name, with your email address as the return address, and your full name and contact information is provided as part of the submission. These messages will only be sent out under your name as you approve them on an individual basis using our email tool. You are solely responsible for the specific messages you send using our email tool.

Sending Emails Via California Calls’s Petition Website

In certain cases, We enable petitioners to send individual emails to signers of petitions they have created, the president, legislators, and other petition targets, as well as letters to the editor to various news publications, through our website.

These messages are sent in the petitioner’s name, with the petitioner’s email address as the return address. The petitioner’s full name and contact information is provided as part of the submission. These messages will be sent out under the petitioner’s name only as the petitioner approves them on an individual basis using our email messaging tool. 

If you are a petitioner, you are solely responsible for the specific message(s) you send using our email tool.

Financial Donations

California Calls Education Fund treats our donors’ credit card information with the highest level of privacy and security, following industry best practices. Our donation pages use a secure (SSL/https) connection to send credit card data directly to a leading payment processor that is certified Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliant. California Calls Education Fund never has access to or stores credit card numbers in any format on any of our servers.

Phone Campaigns

By signing up and entering your telephone number, you consent to receive and authorize California Calls Education Fund  and California Calls Action Fund to send prerecorded audio messages (including calls to mobile phones), or other communications sent by an autodialer to your mobile device.

From time to time, California Calls Education Fund staff members, volunteers, and vendors may contact you by telephone about our campaigns.

If you would like to be removed permanently from our phone list, please email info@cacalls.org, and allow 8-10 business days for your information to be removed.

Text Campaigns

By signing up and entering your telephone number, you consent to receive and authorize California Calls Education Fund  and California Calls Action Fund to send recurring text messages by an automatic telephone dialing system.

From time to time, California Calls.org staff members, volunteers, and vendors may contact you by text about our campaigns.

Text STOP to 668366 to unsubscribe from California Calls text message alerts.

Age Requirement to Use the Site

Visitors who are under 13 years of age should ask their parent or legal guardian for assistance when using the site and should not submit any personally identifying information to the site without first obtaining written consent from their parents and from California Calls. Visitors under 13 years of age should not make donations or use the California Calls Education Fund email tool.

Advertising

We may place online advertising with third-party vendors, including Google, which will be shown on other sites on the internet. In some cases, those third-party vendors may decide which ads to show you based on your prior visits to the site. If you prefer to opt out of the use of these third-party cookies on the site, you can do so by visiting the Network Advertising Initiative opt out page.

Data Tracking and Cookies

We use cookies and periodically analyze web logs. We may also use third-party services, including Google Analytics. This helps Us understand traffic patterns and know if there are problems with our site. We may also use embedded images in emails to track open rates for our mailings, so that we can tell which mailings appeal most.

Cookies and URLs contained in emails may contain an ID that enables Us to correctly identify the person who takes an action using a web page. We use these URLs to simplify the process of signing petitions and filling out surveys. We may occasionally present a shortened URL that references a longer URL which contains an ID—we do this to simplify the display, to prevent links from becoming broken when copied, and to ensure compatibility with email programs which do not handle long URLs. When a shortened URL is displayed in an email, you will see the full URL in the browser’s address bar when you access the page.

Non-Personally Identifiable Information

We may share aggregate information about who and where site visitors and members are with third parties including, but not limited to, legislators, partner organizations, and political campaigns. This information will be disclosed in aggregate form only and will not, under any circumstances, contain personally identifiable information. Examples of this type of aggregate data include, but are not limited to, how many site visitors and California Calls members live in a town, or how many new people from a particular state have joined California Calls this year. We may also use such aggregate information to analyze trends, administer the site, and gather broad demographic information for aggregate use.

Links to Other Websites

California Calls Education Fund may provide links to third party websites, and other websites may provide links to the site. Third party websites operate according to their own terms of use and privacy policies. California Calls Education Fund  has no control over such third party websites, and by using this site, you acknowledge and agree that California Calls Education Fund  is not responsible for the availability of such third party sites and does not endorse and is not responsible or liable for any content, advertising, products, or other materials on or available from such sites. You further acknowledge and agree that California Calls Education Fund  will not be responsible or liable, directly or indirectly, for any damage or loss caused or alleged to be caused by or in connection with use of or reliance on any content, advertising, products, or other materials on or available from such sites.

Changes to the Privacy Policy

California Calls Education Fund may revise or amend our privacy policy at any time at our sole discretion. We encourage users to visit this page periodically to review our current policy.

Contact

If you have any questions about this privacy statement, your personal information, or the practices of this Site, you can contact us at info@cacalls.org

Communications from California Calls Education Fund

California Calls will send you updates on this and other important campaigns by email, postal mail, phone, text message, and other electronic means. If at any time you would like to unsubscribe from our email list, you may do so using the personalized link in any of the emails we send you. 

Last updated: January 23, 2025