Privacy policy

Who we are

Frankie’s Friends Animal Rescue, Norfolk, VA — a volunteer, foster-based animal rescue. We are the people who decide what happens to the information described here.

What we collect, and when

• When you apply to adopt, foster or volunteer: your name, email address, phone number, the city and state you live in, and your answers about your home, household, pets and experience. We ask for this because we cannot responsibly place an animal without it.
• When you use the contact form: your name, email address, subject and message.
• When you send us an adoption story: your name, email address, your animal’s name, your story, and any photo or video you attach. Your photo or video is uploaded to our file storage as soon as you select it, so it is safely kept even if you do not finish the form. Nothing is published until you tick the consent box and a volunteer reviews it.
• When you visit any page: aggregate, privacy-friendly traffic statistics through Vercel Analytics — which pages are popular, roughly where visitors come from, and what device they used. It does not use cookies to track you across other websites, and it does not build a profile of you.

We do not collect payment information. Donations are handled entirely by our payment provider, on their own systems, under their own privacy policy — we never see your card details.

What we do with it

We use it to reply to you, to assess an application, to arrange a meet-and-greet, to keep in touch about an animal you adopted or fostered, and to keep basic records of our own placements. That is all.

We do not sell your information, we do not rent it, and we do not trade it with other organisations. We will not add you to a mailing list because you filled in an application form.

Who else sees it

Only the volunteers who need to, plus the services that run this site on our behalf: our hosting and database providers (Vercel and Neon), our file storage (Vercel Blob, where photos and videos are kept), and our email provider. They process data for us and are not permitted to use it for anything else.

During an adoption we may speak to the references you give us — your landlord and your vet — using the contact details you provide. We will not contact anyone you have not told us about. The foster family caring for the animal will see your application, because they help choose the home.

How long we keep it

• Contact messages: about a year, then deleted.
• Applications we did not proceed with: about two years, in case you apply again or ask us why.
• Completed adoptions and foster placements: for the animal’s lifetime, because we promise to take them back and need to know who has them.
• Published stories: until you ask us to remove them.

Your choices

Write to us and we will do any of the following, free of charge: tell you what we hold about you, correct it, delete it, or take a published story or photo down. We will do it as quickly as volunteers reasonably can — normally within a few weeks.

The one exception is a completed adoption record, which we keep so we can honour our commitment to take the animal back.

Children

This site is meant for adults. Our forms ask you to confirm your age, or that a parent or guardian is submitting on a young person’s behalf. We do not knowingly collect information from children. If you believe a child has sent us something, tell us and we will delete it.

Security

Information is transmitted over an encrypted connection and stored in a managed database with restricted access. We are a small volunteer organisation, so we will not pretend to guarantee absolute security — but we keep access to the minimum number of people, and we would tell you promptly if something went wrong.

Changes to this policy

If we change how we handle your information we will update this page and change the date at the top.

Getting in touch

Questions about any of this, or a request about your own information: use our contact form.