Privacy policy

What this site collects when you apply to serve with Team Expansion or take part in a program, why, who can see it, how long we keep it, and your choices. See also the terms of use.

Last updated: October 28, 2026

This privacy policy explains what Team Expansion Evangelistic Ministries Inc, doing business as Team Expansion ("Team Expansion", "we", "us"), collects from you when you use this website to apply to serve with us or to take part in one of our programs, why we collect it, who can see it, how long we keep it, and the choices you have.

This site is different from our main website at teamexpansion.org, and this policy is different from the one published there. The main site's policy covers visiting our public pages, giving, and signing up for news. This policy covers the application and program portal you are using now, which asks you for far more, and far more sensitive, information than a visitor to a website usually shares. Where the two policies differ, this one governs what you do here.

Who we are and how to reach us

Team Expansion Evangelistic Ministries Inc, doing business as Team Expansion, is a nonprofit mission organization based in the United States.

  • Post: 4112 Old Routt Road, Louisville, Kentucky 40299, United States
  • Email: info@teamexpansion.org

Write to either address with any question about this policy or about your information. Please put "Privacy" in the subject line so it reaches the right people quickly.

What this policy covers

This policy covers the Team Expansion application and program portal: the pages where you create an account, complete and submit an application to serve with Team Expansion, upload documents, accept agreements, and, if you are accepted into a program such as the Pathways internship, the pages you use during that program. It applies to every web address at which Team Expansion serves this portal.

It also covers the sign-up we offer at events, described under "Sign-ups at events" below, which does not need an account.

It does not cover Team Expansion's main website, our giving pages, or other websites we link to. Each of those has its own policy.

The information you give us

Almost everything on this site is information you type or upload yourself. We describe it here in categories so that you know, before you begin, what an application asks for. Which of these categories actually applies to you depends on the program you apply to; the application shows you each page before you fill it in, and you can save a draft and stop at any point.

Your account. Your first and last name, email address and phone number. The email address is how you sign in: we email you a one-time code each time, so there is no password.

Personal details. Legal and preferred names, other names you have used, date and place of birth, home and (for students) college addresses, phone numbers, occupation, marital status, spouse's name, and the names, genders and dates of birth of your children.

Citizenship and travel. Whether you are a U.S. citizen, your country of citizenship, work permit status, whether you hold a passport, passport number, visas and their expiry dates, and whether you hold a concealed carry permit.

Background check identifiers. For programs that require a background check, your Social Security number, driver's license number and state of issuance, former addresses, and other names you have used. These are collected only on the background check page and only under a separate written authorization that you read and accept first. See "Background checks" below.

Faith, ministry and experience. Your church background, beliefs, baptism, ministry roles, experience living or serving abroad, languages, education and employment history, your interest in a particular field or role, and your church leadership's response to your plans.

Life history and health. For some programs, an extended questionnaire about your family history, relationships and marriage, finances and debt, physical health and medications, emotional and mental health and any counseling, alcohol and drug use, criminal history, and sexual history, including questions about abuse you may have experienced. These are the most personal questions the application asks. They are asked because they matter to your safety and the safety of the people you would serve alongside, and they are protected as described under "How we protect it".

References, emergency contacts and family. The names, relationships and contact details of people you list as references or as an emergency contact, and the details about your spouse and children mentioned above. See "Information about other people" below.

Documents. Files you upload, such as transcripts, letters, a passport scan and, where a program asks for it, a photograph of yourself.

Agreements. For each agreement you accept in the application, the exact version of the text you read, the full legal name you typed, the date and time, and the internet address you accepted it from.

During a program. If you are accepted into a program run through this portal, such as the Pathways internship, the portal also holds: the answers you give on program forms (for example travel details and shirt size), your progress through guidebook pages, checklists and training videos and any comprehension check scores, your support-raising goal and the gifts recorded against it, including donor names and amounts as recorded by our finance team, and your passport details and scan where the program requires them.

The information we collect automatically

We collect very little automatically, and none of it is for advertising or analytics about you.

  • Internet address and browser. Your IP address is used to limit repeated sign-in attempts, and it is recorded, with your browser's identifying string, when you accept an agreement and in the security logs described under "Access logging".
  • Email delivery records. When we email you, we keep a record that the email was sent, to which address, when, and whether it was delivered. We do not keep the body of a sign-in code email.
  • Operational telemetry. Our hosting platform records requests, errors and performance data so we can keep the site running. This telemetry is configured not to include the content of what you type.

Cookies. This site sets only the cookies it needs to work: a session cookie that keeps you signed in, a short-lived cookie that carries your sign-in while you enter your code, and a cookie that protects forms against forgery. None of them is used for advertising, tracking across other sites, or analytics, and no third party sets cookies on our pages, with one exception: training pages in the Pathways program embed videos through YouTube's privacy-enhanced player. If you play a video, Google may set cookies and collect information under its own privacy policy. We do not use a cookie banner because we set no cookies that require your consent.

Why we use your information

We use your information to:

  • Create and secure your account, sign you in with a one-time code, and let you return to a saved application.
  • Receive and evaluate your application for the program you chose, including reading your answers and documents, contacting the references you provide, and deciding whether to invite you to the next step. Team Expansion accepts applicants at its discretion, and submitting an application does not guarantee acceptance.
  • Run background checks where a program requires them, under the separate authorization described below.
  • Prepare you for and support you in a program, including provisioning your program account, sending reminders about deadlines and events, tracking training and checklist progress, showing you your support-raising progress, and holding travel and passport details the program needs.
  • Communicate with you about your application and program. Every email this site sends is about your own application or program: sign-in codes, confirmations, status changes, invitations and reminders. This site sends no marketing or newsletters. If you want news from Team Expansion, that is a separate choice you make on our main website or on the Connect tab at one of our event booths (see "Sign-ups at events").
  • Keep the site and your data secure, investigate misuse, and keep the records we are required to keep.
  • Meet our legal obligations, including under the Fair Credit Reporting Act for background checks.

If you are in a place whose law asks us to name a legal basis for each use: we rely on the steps you ask us to take toward a possible service relationship with you, on your consent for the sensitive categories, which you give by choosing to answer each page and accept each agreement, on our legitimate interest in running a safe and well-governed mission organization, and on our legal obligations.

Background checks

Some programs require a background check. Before the application asks for your Social Security number and driver's license number, it shows you a separate authorization that explains what the check covers, who performs it, and your rights under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, including your right to a copy of any report about you. You accept that authorization by typing your full legal name. If you do not accept it, the identifiers are not collected and the application cannot be submitted for that program.

The check is performed by a consumer reporting agency acting as our independent contractor, currently First Advantage. We provide it with only the identifying information it needs. The authorization you accept must be kept on file for at least five years after the check is requested, and we keep it for that long even if the rest of your application is deleted sooner.

Once the check has been filed, staff remove your full Social Security number and driver's license number from your application, keeping only the last four digits of the Social Security number so that the record can still be identified. Until that happens, the full numbers are shown to staff masked, and every time a staff member reveals or prints the full number, who did so and when is recorded.

Information about other people

An application asks you for information about people other than yourself: your references, your emergency contact, your spouse, your children, and, during a program, the people who give toward your support. Please give us this information only if you are entitled to. Tell your references and your emergency contact that you have named them and that Team Expansion may contact them, and make sure they are willing.

We use a reference's details only to contact them about your application, and an emergency contact's details only in an emergency or to confirm them with you. Information about your family is used only to evaluate and support your application. Donor names recorded against your support-raising goal are shown to you so you can thank the people supporting you, and to the staff and coaches responsible for your program; a donor who asks to remain anonymous is shown to you as "Anonymous".

If someone named in an application contacts us about their own information, we will respond to them under this policy.

Sign-ups at events

At some events, such as conferences and mission weekends, we have a booth where you can sign up on a tablet to hear from us. You do not need an account, and you can stop at any point. This section covers what you give us that way.

What we collect. Your name, phone number and email address; your church, which you may choose from a list or type in; what you are interested in, from the choices the sign-up offers; and anything you write under "Other". On the Connect tab, which signs you up for our prayer and newsletter emails, we collect only your name, your email address and the emails you choose.

Who sees it. Team Expansion staff who follow up on sign-ups read it. It is stored encrypted, under a key of its own for each event. When what you asked about is handled by another Team Expansion team, such as our church or training teams, we pass your details to that team so they can contact you. When you ask about one of our programs, a staff member may use your name, email address and phone number to start an application for you to that program, creating an account for you on this site if you do not already have one, and email you about the next step. When you sign up on the Connect tab, our staff add your name and email address to the email lists you chose in SendPulse, the email service that sends those emails (the sign-up form on our main website uses it too). You can unsubscribe from any of them at any time. As with everything this policy covers, we do not sell it or share it for advertising.

How long we keep it. Our policy is to delete what you typed 90 days after we receive it, whether or not anyone has followed up. What remains is a record that an entry was received at that event, when, and whether it was handled, with no name, phone number, email address or church, so that we can count sign-ups. If we created an account for you, that account is covered by the rest of this policy. As with everything else here, deleting from the live system does not remove it from our database backups, which are kept for seven days; the honest figure is 90 days plus seven. Once you are on one of our email lists you stay on it until you unsubscribe; that list is kept in SendPulse, not on this site.

A church you add. If you type in a church that is not on our list, Team Expansion may add it to our list of churches for future visitors. That list holds a church's name, city and state only, and never your name or any of your details.

Who can see your information

Team Expansion staff, by role. Access inside Team Expansion is granted by role and limited to the people who need it: the staff who process applications for your program, human resources, leadership involved in your placement, and, for program participants, the coordinator and the coach assigned to you, who sees only their assigned participants. The agreements you accept in the application describe in their own words who may see your application and assessments; those agreements are part of this picture and you should read them as you accept them.

Service providers who process data for us. We use a small number of companies to run this site, each under a contract that limits them to acting on our instructions:

  • Microsoft Azure hosts the site, the database and the file storage, and holds the encryption keys, in data centers in the United States.
  • Postmark (ActiveCampaign) delivers the emails the site sends, such as sign-in codes and status notices.
  • SignWell provides electronic signature. Where a program asks you to sign your completed application, a copy of it is sent to SignWell so you can sign it, and the signed copy is returned to us. Your Social Security number and driver's license number are masked in that copy.
  • First Advantage performs background checks, as described above, under your separate authorization.
  • YouTube (Google) hosts the training videos embedded in the Pathways program pages.

Organizations you may serve with. The agreements you accept for some programs authorize us to share your application with a partner organization or field team to which you would be seconded or with which you would be affiliated. We share it only for that purpose, and only as those agreements describe.

When the law requires it. We may disclose information to comply with a legal obligation, a court order or a lawful request, to protect someone's safety, or to protect our rights.

A change to our organization. If Team Expansion's work is transferred to a successor organization, your information may be transferred with it, under this policy.

We do not sell your personal information, we do not share it for advertising, and we have never done so. We do not use it to train artificial intelligence systems.

How we protect it

We treat what you tell us here as confidential, and the site is built around that.

  • Everything the application asks you for, apart from your name, email address, phone number and the names of your uploaded files, is encrypted before it is written to the database or to file storage, each application and each document under its own key. Those keys are themselves protected by a key held in a hardware-backed key store that the application can use but never read. A copy of the database on its own is unreadable.
  • Your name, email address and phone number are kept readable so that you can sign in and so that staff can find your application; they are still stored in an encrypted database and transmitted only over encrypted connections.
  • Social Security numbers, driver's license numbers and passport numbers are shown masked, and every reveal or print of the full number by a staff member is recorded with their identity, the time and the address they did it from.
  • Staff sign in through Team Expansion's own identity system and act under named roles. Staff cannot sign in to the applicant side of the site and applicants cannot reach the staff side.
  • Uploaded files can be opened only through the site, by you or by authorized staff; there are no shareable file links.
  • Pages that show your information are marked so browsers do not store them in shared caches.

No system is perfectly secure. If a breach affecting your information ever occurs, we will tell you as the law requires, and sooner where we can.

Access logging

To make the protections above provable, the site keeps logs of who did what. Some of those logs are about you: which staff member revealed or printed your identifiers, when a staff member opened your passport scan, when an archived copy of your application was opened and why, and every change to your application's status. These logs are kept separately from your application data and are not deleted when your application is deleted, because their purpose is to answer, later, who saw your information.

How long we keep it

We keep your information for as long as your application or program relationship is active, and then for the periods below. Two things are true of every period here. First, applications genuinely take time: references arrive slowly, and some applicants pace themselves over a year or more, so we do not delete an application that is still in progress, however old. Second, deleting information from the live system does not immediately remove it from our database backups, which are kept for seven days; the honest figure for any deletion below is therefore the stated period plus seven days.

Applications that are declined or withdrawn. Our policy is to delete the content of the application 90 days after the decision: every answer, document, note, message and agreement response. What remains after that is a skeleton record of your name, email address, phone number, the program, the outcome and the dates. We keep the skeleton indefinitely so that if you apply again we can connect the applications, and so that the outcome of a previous application is not lost. The background check authorization, where one was given, is kept for the five years described above.

Applications that are accepted. Your application stays intact while you are preparing for, serving in or taking part in a program, because it is the record staff work from. When that active period ends, a sealed copy of your completed application is archived as the record of your service with Team Expansion, and the working copy is then deleted. Archived records are opened only for a stated reason, and each opening is logged.

Background check identifiers. Your full Social Security number and driver's license number are removed from your application by staff once the background check has been filed, leaving only the last four digits of the Social Security number. Staff are prompted when an application has held identifiers for more than 30 days.

Passport details held during a program. Your passport number and the name as printed are removed after your program ends, leaving the last four digits, the expiry date and a record of when the removal happened.

Sign-ups at events. What you type at one of our event booths is deleted on its own, shorter schedule, described under "Sign-ups at events" above.

Access logs and agreement records are kept for as long as the organization needs to be able to answer who saw your information and what you agreed to, and are not deleted with the application.

If you would like to withdraw an application, sign in and use the option on your application, or write to us. Withdrawing starts the 90-day period above.

Your choices and rights

Whatever the law where you live, we extend the following to everyone who uses this site.

  • Access. While your application is a draft, everything you have entered is visible to you on the site. At any time you may ask us for a copy of the information we hold about you.
  • Correction. You can change your answers yourself while an application is a draft. After submission, ask us and staff will correct the record; every staff correction to an application is logged.
  • Deletion. You may ask us to delete your information. We will do so except where we must keep it: the background check authorization for its five years, the skeleton record described above, the access logs, and anything the law requires us to retain. We will tell you what we kept and why.
  • Withdrawal. You may withdraw an application at any time, and you may decline to answer any question or accept any agreement, understanding that some are required for the program to proceed.
  • Copy of a background check report. You are entitled to a complete copy of any background report about you, on request, within a reasonable time of its being produced, and to a written summary of your rights under the Fair Credit Reporting Act.

To exercise any of these, write to us at the addresses above. We will need to confirm that you are the person the information is about, which we will normally do by writing back to the email address on your account. We do not charge for requests and we do not treat anyone differently for making one.

If you live in California, Virginia or another U.S. state with a privacy law, you have rights to know what personal information we collect and how we use and share it, to correct or delete it, to obtain a copy, and to opt out of the sale of your information or its use for targeted advertising or profiling. This policy is how we tell you what we collect; we do not sell your information or use it for targeted advertising or profiling; and the rest of your rights are honored through the requests described above. You may authorize someone to make a request for you; we will ask them to show that they are authorized.

If you live in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or Switzerland, you also have the rights to restrict or object to processing and to data portability, and to complain to your data protection authority. This site is operated from the United States and your information is stored and processed there, where the law may protect it differently from your own. By using it you ask us to process your information in the United States for the purposes in this policy.

Children

This site is for adults. You must be at least 18 years old to create an account or apply through it, and we do not knowingly collect information from anyone younger. The one exception is information about your own children, which an application asks you for as part of your family details. If we learn that someone under 18 has created an account, we will close it and delete what they entered.

The portal links to other websites, such as YouTube, SignWell and, for program participants, giving pages run by other providers. Those sites have their own privacy policies and we do not control them.

Changes to this policy

We will update this policy when the site changes in a way that affects your information. The date at the top tells you when it last changed. If a change materially affects how we handle information you have already given us, we will tell you by email at the address on your account before it takes effect.