Are there feeds and where is the data stored?

Hi @gillesgagnon

Civist is a team of activists, engineers, and data protectors. We aim to get you and your campaign started as quickly as possible without compromising privacy (regulations) nor performance.

Suppose you are looking for a modern petition form with integrated email verification. In that case, you will find this in our free Activist tier: https://civist.com/legal/pricing/. It includes a fundraising option in case you want to make your activism more sustainable. For each donation processed, we charge a percentage of fees to cover the costs of the payment service provider and ours. Therefore, costs are only incurred in the Activist Plan when donations are collected.

If you need a custom email template for your campaign or faster response times from our support, the Organisation tier is a good fit. We invoice the yearly subscription fee only after all customisations and integrations into your infrastructure are done and verified as working. We recommend it to organisations with up to 50.000 supporters.

Some of our clients run massive international campaigns with special requirements and custom integrations into their infrastructure. In such cases, we prefer to recommend our Flex tier. As the name suggests, it is the most flexible option of our three tiers and is usually not the first choice if you want to start a local campaign.

Civist integrates into your WordPress as a regular plugin. However, the configurations for petitions and fundraisers are stored in the cloud. The signatures and donations are also stored in the cloud. Cloud, in this case, means data centres in Belgium and Germany. This is how we provide a performant and secure environment for our client’s campaigns and data.

In legalese, Civist provides its services as a sub-processor (GDPR summary: https://www.gdprsummary.com/gdpr-definitions/sub-processor/). Our obligation is to deliver a highly functional campaign platform that keeps your and your supporter’s data safe.

If you have further questions, please get in touch with us through our support form directly in the Civist Plugin at any time.

Have a great day!

Thanks for your response.
Storing this information on the Cloud, Civist’s cloud, isn’t optimal. As we have no idea what security measures are truly in place.

It would be much better if this private information was kept in the hands of its owner, the organization using the plugin.

Thanks, we’ll have to give the costs and security concerns some serious thought.

Cheers.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 11 months ago by korg007.
• This reply was modified 1 year, 11 months ago by korg007.

Hello @gillesgagnon

It all depends on how you define optimal. Civist is a SaaS and has served many professional organisations since 2017. Time and time again, our clients’ data protection officers evaluated and audited Civist’s data protection measures under the strict rules of the GDPR. So, data protection is an integral part of our work.

Civist handles sensitive data (person relatable and personal data and financial transactions), and storing this information in WordPress is not advisable, especially if you are located in the EU or any other region with strict data protection legislation.

Feel free to contact our certified (TüV Rhineland) data protection officer via [email protected] if you have questions regarding Civist’s security measures.

That said, a couple of petition plugins for WordPress store all data directly in your WordPress. And that’s the good thing about WordPress: you can choose freely from many different plugins to scratch your itch.

I will mark this topic as resolved.

All the best!