Privacy.

This website.

When you use a form on this site, we receive what you enter, such as your name, role, church, email address, and message, and use it only to respond to you and set up any survey you request. We do not sell or share it. This site is hosted by WordPress.com, which collects standard visitor statistics; see the WordPress.com privacy policy for details.

Contact lists.

To invite people to a study, the commissioning church may give us a contact list, such as names and email addresses. We use it only to send invitations and reminders for that study. We never sell or share it, and we delete it when the study closes.

Responses.

• Survey responses and interview notes come to Church Research Partners, not to the church.
• The church receives aggregate results only. It never sees who responded or how any individual answered.^†
• No group smaller than 5 people is reported separately.
• Comments are stripped of names and identifying details. A comment that would still reveal its author is summarized, not quoted.
• Survey responses are never linked to giving records.
• Taking part is voluntary.

^†Except in a campaign feasibility study; see below.

Service providers and AI.

We use third-party services to run surveys, send invitations, and store files, and AI tools to help analyze response data. These providers handle data only to provide their service to us. We remove names and contact details from the data before it goes to any AI tool. Where a provider lets us choose, we use settings that keep study data from being used to train AI models. We check every AI-assisted result against the responses themselves.

How long we keep data.

Contact lists are deleted when the study closes. Raw responses and interview notes are deleted 12 months after the report is delivered, unless the written agreement for that study says otherwise. The church owns its report.

Campaign feasibility studies.

The church may share giving history so we can choose whom to interview and estimate what the congregation can raise. Only Ben sees it, we use it only for that study, and we delete it when the study closes. Interviewees agree in advance that what they say about their own giving may be shared with the campaign’s leaders. Everything else they say is reported only as themes.

The Invitation Score.

When a church takes the free Invitation Score, we keep its anonymized results and may combine them with other congregations’ results to report comparisons. Combined results never name a congregation or include comments that could identify anyone.

Churches outside the United States.

For churches in the UK and European Union, data-protection terms are agreed in the proposal.

Questions and requests.

To ask what we hold about you, or to ask us to delete it, write to ben@churchresearchpartners.com. Once responses are de-identified, we may no longer be able to connect them to you.