Privacy Policy

The Orphan Care Compass is designed to help orphan-care ministries access useful knowledge and resources while minimizing the personal information needed to use the tool.

Information Used by the Orphan Care Compass

The Orphan Care Compass primarily uses publicly available information about organizations and ministries.

When you submit a ministry website for review, OCC may review information available on that website and other relevant public sources to better understand the ministry, including its programs, locations, populations served, service models, and publicly described practices.

OCC may also ask you for limited information, such as your ministry’s approximate annual operating budget, to help provide recommendations appropriate to your organization’s capacity.

Public Facebook and Instagram Information

If OCC’s public social-media review feature is enabled, OCC may use Meta’s Graph API to review up to 50 recent public posts from Facebook or an eligible public Instagram professional account linked on the ministry’s own website. OCC looks at post dates and text for giving options, publicly shared statistics or impact statements, outcome language, and patterns in how the ministry communicates its work. OCC may note when wording is very similar across posts as a pattern for a person to consider; it cannot tell whether followers are tired of seeing a message or whether a post led to donations. Figures and impact statements are what the ministry has reported publicly; OCC does not independently verify them.

OCC checks post text in memory and does not retain the original text. It may use summary counts and links to a few public posts as evidence in the review. It does not request private posts, comments, messages, follower information, photos, or videos, and it does not assess or identify individual children. Any themes OCC observes come from a small sample and are not a complete picture of the ministry. If a Page cannot be reviewed, OCC treats it as unreviewed—not as evidence that the ministry does not do something.

Information You Provide

You may voluntarily provide information when you use OCC, contact Telos, provide feedback, or communicate with us through the website.

Do not provide confidential case information, children’s names, medical information, personal histories, or other sensitive information about individual children or families.

OCC is designed to help organizations strengthen their ministries. It is not designed to evaluate individual children or cases.

How We Use Information

Information provided to Telos may be used to:

• provide Orphan Care Compass guidance;
• better understand a ministry and its operating context;
• improve OCC and the Telos website;
• respond to questions and feedback; and
• maintain and operate our website and services.

Telos does not sell your personal information.

Technology Providers

Telos may use third-party technology and service providers to operate our website and the Orphan Care Compass. Information may be processed by these providers as necessary to provide those services. If OCC’s public social-media review feature is enabled, Meta’s Graph API is used to retrieve the limited public Facebook and Instagram information described above; Meta processes those requests under its own terms and privacy practices.

Children’s Privacy and Safeguarding

The Telos website and Orphan Care Compass are intended for adults and organizations working in or interested in orphaned and vulnerable child care. They are not intended for use by children.

Protecting the dignity, privacy, and safety of vulnerable children is important to Telos. Please do not use OCC to submit confidential or sensitive information about individual children or families.

Public Information Has Limits

OCC works primarily from publicly available information. If OCC does not find evidence of a particular practice online, that does not mean the practice is not happening within the ministry.

OCC’s recommendations are intended to encourage learning and useful conversations, not to make definitive judgments about an organization’s internal operations.

Links to Other Organizations

The Telos website and OCC may link to resources and websites provided by other organizations. Those organizations have their own privacy practices and policies.

Requesting Deletion of Information

To request deletion of information you provided to Telos through Orphan Care Compass or this website, please use our Contact page and include “Privacy or data deletion request” in your message. Please don’t include confidential information about children or families.

Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy as the Orphan Care Compass and our website develop. The current version will be posted on this page.