Privacy Policy

THRED, a project of Lutheran Hour Ministries (LHM), is the sole owner of the information collected on this site. We will not sell or rent this information to others in ways different from what is disclosed in this statement. We are committed to maintaining the accuracy, confidentiality and security of your personal information.

We have adopted this policy in order to address specific privacy concerns, and it applies to how we collect, use and disclose personal information of individuals who visit our website.

By using our website and, if applicable, submitting your personal information, you agree to the terms of this Privacy Policy.

Privacy Policy Effective for United States

This Privacy Policy covers only those activities that are subject to the provisions of United States of America federal and state laws, as applicable. Consequently, the rights and obligations contained in this Privacy Policy may not be available to all individuals or in all jurisdictions. If you request that we share your personal information with one of our ministry partners in other countries through a project of Lutheran Hour Ministries, that partner will be responsible for your personal information and their use of your personal information will be subject to the applicable laws in that country.

What Information Do We Collect?

You can visit our website without telling us who you are or revealing personal information about yourself, including your e-mail address. Our web server and third-party analytics programs may collect anonymous information related to your visit to our website, which may include: IP address and domain used to access our website, your approximate geographical location, websites visited before or after your visit to a THRED or Lutheran Hour Ministries site, device and browser information, the website you visited to access our website, the entry and exit pages on our site, as well as any additional pages viewed on our site. We use this information to monitor our website’s performance (such as number of visits, average time spent, page views, etc.) and for our own operational and advertising purposes, such as working to continually upgrade our website and delivering ads to you for programs in which you may have an interest.

This information may be captured using automated tracking technologies such as browser cookies, flash cookies, and web beacons, and may also be collected through the use of third party tracking services (such as Google Analytics) and third-party cookies (such as the DoubleClick cookie) together to inform, optimize, and serve ads based on your past visits to our website.

In addition, we collect the personal information that you submit to our website, such as your name, address and any other information that you choose to provide. Collection may occur, for example, when you:

Contact us through our website;
Create an account (examples: e-mail subscriptions, sections and downloads which require a password, online shopping with THRED)
Make a donation or purchase order, resulting in an appropriate receipt;
Receive and review online information about us;
Apply for a position or to volunteer through our website;
Request resources, book an event, or
Correspond with an employee or representative of THRED.

Where you request information from us, we may use the e-mail address that you provide to send you information about our ministry and resources that may be of interest to you. If you have agreed to receive communications from us, such as by e-mail, you may ask us to remove you from the list at any time by using the Unsubscribe link on our subscription e-mails.

What about Online Advertising?

We promote and encourage support of our organizational activities and resources by occasionally using advertising space on third-party websites including Remarketing with Google Analytics. When you visit some websites, we or a third party may place one or more types of cookies on your computer in order to recognize your computer. Because we advertise about our programs and initiatives on third-party websites, we are able to compile anonymous information over time about the types of pages, content, and ads you or others who use your computer visited or viewed. This anonymous information is used for many purposes. For example, it helps us try to ensure that you do not see the same advertisements repeatedly. We also use this anonymous information to help select and display targeted advertisements on third-party websites that encourage support of THRED.

We use non-personally identifiable information from interest based advertising or audience data from third parties (such as age, gender, and interests) to get a broad understanding of the demographics of our website audience.

Third-party companies also may collect anonymous information about your activity on our websites and applications and on third-party websites and applications using online tracking technologies, such as cookies and web beacons. Tracking data collected by these third-party companies is used to decide which advertisements you see on third-party websites and applications, but does not identify you personally.

This data collection is through Google’s Display Advertising (e.g., Remarketing, Google Display Network Impression Reporting, the DoubleClick Campaign Manager integration, or Google Analytics Demographics and Interest Reporting). Third-party vendors, including Google, may show these ads on sites across the Internet.

Together with third-party vendors, including Google, we may use first-party cookies (such as the Google Analytics cookies) and third-party cookies (such as the DoubleClick cookie) together to report how our ad impressions, other uses of ad services, and interactions with these ad impressions and ad services are related to visits to our site.

You may choose not to receive targeted advertisements from many ad networks, data exchanges, marketing analytics and other service providers by visiting the Ad Preferences Manager.

Linking to Other Websites

Our website may contain links to other websites. To allow you to interact with third-party websites on which you may have accounts (such as social media websites) or join communities on such websites, we may provide links or embed third-party applications that allow you to login, post content, or join communities from our websites.

Please note that the third-party websites accessed through links on our site are subject to that site’s privacy policy and standards. Once you leave our site to visit a non-THRED site, we cannot assume any responsibility for the privacy practices, policies or actions of the third parties that operate these websites, or for how they collect, use or disclose your personal information. You should review the privacy policies of these websites before providing them with personal information.

Why Do We Collect and Use Personal Information?

The personal information collected through our website is used and disclosed for our ministry purposes. For example, we may collect, use and disclose your personal information to:

Establish, maintain and manage our relationship with you and fulfill orders that have been requested;
Be able to review the products and services that we provide to you so that we may work to improve our program;
Be able to comply with your requests;
Protect us against error, fraud, theft and damage to our property; and
Enable us to comply with applicable law or regulatory process (for example, we may collect personal information to satisfy the obligations imposed on us by various regulators).
Communicate with you about our program and resources which may be of interest to you.

We do not sell, rent or lease your personal information to other organizations. In order to fulfill the ministry and organizational purposes for which you provided us your personal information, it may be shared with our employees, other Lutheran organizations and any parties who require such information to assist us with establishing, maintaining and managing our relationship with you and providing products and services. For example, LHM depends on certain information technology, data processing services, and consulting services to affiliated organizations and ministry partners (in the US or abroad) to provide ministry services. As a result, your personal information may transit through or be collected, used, processed, stored or disclosed under the control of LHM or one of our affiliated organizations or partners. Where your personal information is provided to partners or service providers, we use confidentiality agreements that restrict the use of your information to the purpose for which it is provided.

Please note that we may collect, use or disclose your publicly-available personal information without your knowledge or consent where we are permitted or required by applicable law or regulatory requirements to do so.

How Do We Protect Your Information?

THRED, as a project of LHM, maintains safeguards that are appropriate to the sensitivity of the personal information in question. These safeguards are designed to prevent your personal information from loss and unauthorized access, copying, use, modification or disclosure.

THRED uses Internet Encryption Software, Secure Socket Layer (SSL) Protocol when collecting or transferring sensitive data such as credit card or banking information. Any information you enter is encrypted at your browser, sent over the public Internet in encrypted form, and then de-crypted at our server. Once we receive your credit card information, it is accessible only to a small number of trusted LHM employees who have been specially trained in processing this information. Credit card information is only stored on our servers, in encrypted form, for the length of time needed for a specific transaction. For example, credit card information for online purchases is passed directly to the credit card processing center immediately and is not stored on our servers at all; credit card information for one-time online donations is stored only as long as is needed for processing the gift; while credit card information for automated recurring donations is stored, in encrypted form, until the recurring gift schedule is cancelled, or the credit card expires, whichever is sooner.

Unfortunately, no data transmission over the Internet can be guaranteed to be 100% secure. As a result, while we strive to protect your personal information, we cannot guarantee the security of any information you transmit to us, and you do so at your own risk. Once this website receives your transmission, we make every reasonable effort to ensure its security on our systems. The security of your personal information is important to us. Please advise us immediately of any incident involving the loss of or unauthorized access to or disclosure of personal information that is in our custody or control.

Updating Your Personal Information

It is important that the information contained in our records is both accurate and current. If your personal information (e-mail, name, address) changes, please keep us informed of such changes. We will replace or append your accounts with the updated information.

Inquiries or Concerns?

If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy or concerns about how we manage your personal information, please contact us in writing or by e-mail.

Revisions to this Privacy Policy

THRED reserves the right to make changes to this Privacy Policy at any time and requests that you review this policy for updates.