Terms of use

These terms are an agreement between you and the William H. Douglas Foundation, the California nonprofit that runs CBOs of America. They cover the website, the waitlist, the demo and the workspace.

Section 18 says how disputes are settled. For organizations and adults it uses private arbitration and not a court, and it rules out class actions. You can opt out within 30 days. Please read it.

1. How you agree

• You agree to these terms when you tick the box that says you agree. We ask for this the first time you sign in, when you join the waitlist and when a parent or guardian answers a consent request. We record the version and the time.
• If you only browse the public pages, sections 7, 8 and 15 to 20 apply to your use of them.
• If you agree for an organization, you confirm that you are allowed to bind it. “You” then means the organization too.
• If an organization has a signed agreement with us, that agreement wins wherever it says something different from these terms.

2. Accounts and age

• Accounts are created by invitation from a member organization. A student may also ask to join their own organization by signing up. That account stays closed until the email address is confirmed, a parent or guardian has agreed if the student is under 18, and the organization's staff have approved it. There is no other public sign up.
• No one under 13 may have an account. An account that turns out to belong to a child under 13 is closed and removed.
• If you are 13 to 17, use the workspace only with the knowledge of a parent or guardian. Your parent or guardian agrees to these terms for you when they give consent, and they decide what is shared with universities.
• Staff accounts must use two-step sign in. Keep your password and your authenticator app to yourself.
• Use your own account only, and give true information. Tell your organization's admin at once if you think someone else has used your account.

3. Memberships and price

• Community-based organizations: $500 a year.
• Universities and colleges: $3,000 a year.
• Schools and district counseling offices: $1,500 a year. A school does not need to work with a CBO.
• Independent counselors: $500 a year.
• Any other organization that is not a CBO, a school or a university: $2,000 a year.
• Students and parents never pay.

Memberships are flat and annual. There is no fee of any kind per referral, per application or per enrollment, and no one is paid when a student is introduced to a university.

A membership does not renew by itself. It runs for 12 months and then ends unless your organization places a new order. We never charge a card again without a new order. If a price changes, the new price applies only to a year you have not yet ordered.

Prices do not include any sales tax that applies. If your organization is exempt, send us its certificate.

4. The founding deposit

An organization that joins the founding waitlist on a paid membership pays a deposit of 50 percent of the first year: $250 for a CBO and $1,500for a university or college. The deposit holds the organization's place in line and is credited in full to its first year.

• The deposit is non-refundable, with the exceptions in the refund policy. The main one: we refund it in full if the workspace is not made available to the organization within 12 months of the payment.
• Before paying, the person signing up must tick a box beside this sentence: “I understand this deposit is non-refundable. It is half of our first year of membership and will be credited in full when our organization joins. We refund it in full if your workspace is not ready within 12 months of your payment.” We record that sentence and the time.
• Payment is taken once, on a page hosted by Stripe. A place on the list is held only once the payment is confirmed.
• Payments are processed through the foundation, and card statements read WHD* CBOS OF AMERICA.

The refund policy is part of these terms.

5. What CBOs and schools agree to

• Enter only information you have the right to hold and to share with us. You are responsible for the notices and permissions your own rules and the law require.
• You stay in control of your students' records. We use them only to provide the workspace to you, and never for advertising. If you are a school, we act as a school official under your direct control.
• Never enter race, ethnicity, nationality, ancestry, immigration status, disability or justice involvement, in any field, note or message. Never upload FAFSA forms, tax returns or financial aid documents.
• Do not invite anyone under 13, and tell us at once if you learn that a child under 13 has an account.
• Record a guardian's consent as “on file” only when you hold that consent in writing, and keep it. Staff may never give the consent that lists a student for universities or releases a student's identity.
• Answer university requests in the interest of the student.
• Pass on to us any request from a student or family that you cannot carry out yourself.
• Remove staff who leave, and limit admin rights to people who need them.

6. What universities agree to

• Do not try to work out who a student is from the limited profiles in Discover.
• Ask only for the details you need, and give the true reason for each request.
• Use a released profile only to contact that student about admission and related opportunities. Do not sell it, and do not share it outside your admissions team.
• Stop using a profile when its release is revoked or expires, and delete every copy, including copies in your own records system, within 30 days. Releases expire after 12 months.
• Protect released profiles with at least the care you give your own student records.
• Accept that every read of a released profile is logged.
• Tell us promptly if a released profile is lost or reached by someone who should not have it.

7. Acceptable use

• Do not try to reach records you are not allowed to see.
• Do not scrape, copy in bulk or resell anything on the site or in the workspace.
• Do not harass, threaten or mislead anyone, and do not pretend to be someone else.
• Do not upload anything unlawful, or anything you have no right to share.
• Do not send viruses or try to slow down or break the service.
• Do not test the security of the service without our written permission.
• Do not send bulk, repeated, automated or off-topic messages, proposals or requests, and do not advertise anything that has nothing to do with the students or the partnership.
• Do not press a student or a family to share information, to apply, to enroll or to pay.
• Do not try to get around a warning, a suspension or a block, including by opening another account.

Communications and requests must be meaningful

Every message, partnership proposal, request for a student's details and published opportunity must have a real purpose that concerns the students or the work you share with the person you are writing to. Say who you are and what you are asking for, ask only for what you need, and accept a no. The community standards set this out in full and are part of these terms.

Abuse, warnings, suspension and blocking

Abuse of the platform, of its members or of the people they serve is not tolerated.

• When a member breaks these rules or the community standards, we tell them in writing what happened and what has to change. That is a warning. We also tell an admin of their organization.
• A member is warned at most 3 times. The third warning is the final one.
• The third and final warning opens a review of the profile by our team. We tell the member that their profile will be reviewed because of abuse that has been reported. No profile is blocked before the member has been told this.
• If the review confirms harmful or non-compliant use, the profile is suspended and the member is blocked from the platform. We write to the member with the decision. A blocked person may not open another account.
• We may suspend or block at once, without going through the warnings, where someone is threatened or put at risk, where a student or a child may be harmed, where someone tries to reach records they may not see, or where the law requires it.
• You can ask us to look again at a warning, a suspension or a block by writing to legal@cbosofamerica.org within 30 days. Our team can lift a block. The warnings stay on record, and if abuse is reported again the profile goes straight back to review.

You can report a message from the conversation or the channel it is in. A report goes to the admins of the organization the message belongs to, and to our team. Section 12 says what our team can and cannot see when it reviews one. We may remove content that breaks these rules.

8. Your content and ours

• What you put into the workspace stays yours, or your organization's. You give us permission to store, copy and display it only as needed to run the service for you.
• The software, the design, the name and the marks of CBOs of America belong to the foundation. You may use them only to use the service.
• The public directory is built from public records. A profile there does not mean the organization has joined or endorsed us.
• If you send us an idea or a suggestion, through the help button or any other way, we may use it to improve the service without owing you anything. We are not obliged to build it, and we do not treat it as confidential, so leave out anything private.
• You are free to say what you think of the service, anywhere. Nothing in these terms limits an honest review or a complaint to a regulator.

9. Copyright complaints

If you believe something on the service copies your work without permission, send a notice to our copyright agent at legal@cbosofamerica.org, or by mail to Copyright Agent, William H. Douglas Foundation, 215 South Robertson Blvd. #307, Beverly Hills, CA 90211. Include:

• your signature, typed or written;
• the work you say was copied;
• where the material is on our service, with enough detail for us to find it;
• your name, address, phone number and email;
• a statement that you believe in good faith the use is not authorized; and
• a statement, under penalty of perjury, that your notice is accurate and that you are the owner or may act for the owner.

We remove material that infringes, tell the person who posted it, and consider a counter notice. We close the accounts of people who infringe repeatedly.

10. The demo

The demo is a shared sandbox with fictional data. Do not enter real personal details. Demo data is reset every night and may be reset at any time.

11. Other services

The workspace can connect to services an organization already uses, such as a spreadsheet or a records system, and it links to other websites. Those services have their own terms. We are not responsible for them. An organization that connects one is responsible for what moves through that connection.

12. Help, support tickets and access to your workspace

The help button

• The help button at the bottom of each page answers common questions from a fixed set of written answers about the service. It is not a person and it is not artificial intelligence. Your question is matched to those answers inside your own browser.
• The answers are general guidance about how the service works. They are not legal, financial, admissions or financial aid advice, and they do not change these terms. If an answer and these terms differ, these terms apply.
• Students and parents are pointed to their own CBO or school first, because the organization knows the student and we do not. The help button is not monitored for emergencies. If someone is in danger, call 911, or call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
• We count how often the help button is opened and which answers are read. When a question from a visitor or a staff member finds no answer, we keep the words of the question for up to 90 days so that we can write one. We never keep the words of a question typed by a student or a parent.

Support tickets

• You can send our team a question, a bug report or a suggestion as a ticket. If you are signed in, the ticket carries your name, your email, your role and your organization. If you are not, it carries the name and email you type. It also carries the page you sent it from and your browser type, which help us find a fault.
• Do not put a password, a sign in code, a card number, or details about a student in a ticket. Never put in a ticket any of the information section 5 says must not be entered.
• We answer by email, and for signed-in senders on the My tickets page. We aim to reply promptly but we do not promise a response time, and support is not a guarantee that a fault will be fixed by a given date. A signed agreement with an organization may say more.
• Tickets are read and answered by our team. An admin of your organization does not see the tickets you send, unless you show them.
• A ticket sent without signing in cannot prove who you are. We may ask you to confirm your identity before we change anything on an account, and we will not release or delete records on the strength of such a ticket alone.
• We may close a ticket that is abusive, that repeats one already answered, or that asks us to do something these terms or the law do not allow.

Access to an organization's workspace

• Our support team cannot open an organization's conversations, or the records of its students, parents and families, as a matter of course. The database refuses.
• Our support team can open them only while an admin of that organization has approved support access. The admin chooses 24 hours, 3 days or 7 days. Access ends by itself when that time is up, and an admin can end it sooner at any moment from the team page.
• We may ask for access when we need it to fix something. The organization is free to say no. If it says no, we may not be able to solve a problem that we cannot see.
• An admin who approves access confirms that they are allowed to do so for their organization, and that doing so fits the organization's own rules and the notices it has given to families. For a school, access given this way is use by a school official under the school's direct control.
• While access is live we use it only to deal with the issue it was given for. We do not copy records out of the workspace, and we never use them for advertising. Each request, approval, refusal and ending of access is written to the audit log, and so is each time we open the text of a reported message.
• Approving support access never opens anything to a university, to another organization or to any other member.
• Without any approval, our team still sees what it needs to run the service: the organization's name, kind and membership, the names and work emails of its staff accounts, billing records, the audit log, tickets sent to us, and counts such as how many accounts exist and how many messages were sent. Counts never include the text of a message.
• A very small number of engineers who run the database and its backups can technically reach stored data. They may do so only to keep the service running and secure, to investigate a security incident, or where the law requires it, and never for any other purpose.

Reported messages

• When a member reports a message, our team sees that a report was made, which organization it belongs to and the reason given. It sees the message itself, with the two messages before and after it, only while that organization has approved support access.
• An admin of the organization can always review a report made inside their own organization. Dealing with the conduct of its own staff and students is the organization's responsibility.
• Do not use a report to make a false accusation. If you believe a child is being harmed, tell the organization and the authorities. A report here is not a report to the police or to a child protection agency, and it does not replace any duty to report that the law places on you.

13. Privacy

The privacy policy and the student data policy are part of these terms.

14. Ending and suspension

• You can stop using the service at any time. An organization can end its membership by writing to legal@cbosofamerica.org. A membership also ends by itself when its year runs out.
• We may suspend or close an account, or end a membership, if these terms are broken, if the law requires it, or if use of the account puts students or the service at risk. Where we can, we give notice and a chance to fix the problem first. Section 7 sets out the warnings a member receives for abuse before being blocked.
• If we end a paid membership without the organization having broken these terms, we refund the unused part of the year.
• When a membership ends, the organization has 30 days to ask for a copy of its records. After that we delete them, as the privacy policy describes.
• Sections 5, 6, 8 and 15 to 20 continue after these terms end.

15. No warranties

We provide the service “as is” and “as available”. To the fullest extent the law allows, we make no promise that it will be uninterrupted, error free or fit for a particular purpose, and we disclaim all implied warranties, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement.

We do not promise that any student will be admitted to, or receive aid from, any college. Information about colleges, careers, costs and scholarships comes from public sources and from organizations, and may be out of date. Check it before you rely on it.

This section does not take away a warranty or a right that the law of your state does not let us limit. In particular, if you use the service as a consumer in Massachusetts or New Jersey, the disclaimer of implied warranties above does not apply to you.

16. Limits on our liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, the foundation, its directors, officers, staff and volunteers are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost data or lost opportunities, however they arise.

Our total liability for all claims about the service in any 12 month period is limited to the larger of the amount you or your organization paid us in that period, or 100 USD.

These limits do not apply to:

• fraud, willful misconduct or gross negligence;
• harm we cause by breaking the law;
• the cost of notifying people of a breach of student records, where a law or our agreement with a school puts that cost on us; or
• anything else the law does not allow us to limit.

If you use the service as a consumer in New Jersey, this section does not limit our liability for intentional or reckless acts, for gross negligence, or under any New Jersey statute that gives you a right to damages.

17. Claims brought by others

This section applies to member organizations only. It never applies to a student, a parent or a guardian.

If someone brings a claim against us because an organization entered information it had no right to enter, recorded a consent it did not hold, misused a released profile, or broke these terms or the law, that organization will defend us and cover the resulting costs and damages. We will tell the organization promptly, let it lead the defense and not settle without its agreement.

18. How disputes are settled

Talk to us first

Write to legal@cbosofamerica.org and describe the problem. Most things are settled this way. Each side gives the other 30 days to resolve it before starting a case.

Arbitration for organizations and adults

If we cannot resolve a dispute, you and we agree to settle it by binding individual arbitration and not in court. There is no judge or jury in arbitration, and review of an arbitrator's decision is limited. The American Arbitration Association runs the arbitration under its rules for the kind of dispute involved. It can be held by video, by phone, on written submissions, or in the county where you live or where your organization is based. For a claim of 10,000 USD or less, we pay all filing, administration and arbitrator fees beyond the first 200 USD. The Federal Arbitration Act governs this section.

No class actions

You and we may bring claims only for ourselves, and not as part of a class, a group or a representative action. An arbitrator may not combine cases. If this paragraph cannot be enforced for a claim, that claim goes to court and the rest of this section still applies.

Who and what is not covered

• Anyone under 18, and a parent or guardian acting for them. Their claims go to court.
• Public schools, public universities and other government bodies. See section 19.
• Claims of sexual harassment or sexual assault. The person bringing one may choose court.
• Small claims. Either side may use a small claims court for a case that qualifies.
• Urgent court orders to stop misuse of student records or of intellectual property.

Your right to opt out

You can opt out of arbitration and the class action waiver by writing to legal@cbosofamerica.org within 30 days of first agreeing to these terms. Give your name, your organization if any, and say that you opt out. Opting out does not affect anything else.

Law and courts

California law governs these terms, without regard to its rules on conflicts of law. Any case that goes to court is heard in the state or federal courts in Los Angeles County, California, and you and we accept those courts. A person who uses the service as a consumer may also bring a case in the courts where they live, and keeps the protections of their home state's consumer law.

Time limit for organizations

A member organization must bring a claim under these terms about a membership, a deposit or a payment within one year of learning of it. This time limit does not apply to individuals.

19. Public schools, public universities and government bodies

If you are a public school, a public college or university, or another government body, and the law that governs you does not allow you to agree to a term here, that term does not apply to you. In particular:

• section 17 applies only as far as your law lets you take on that duty;
• the arbitration and class action terms in section 18 do not apply;
• the law of your own state governs these terms, and cases are heard in the courts your law requires; and
• nothing here waives an immunity or a defense your law gives you.

We sign student data privacy agreements and accessibility terms that schools and public bodies are required to use. Write to legal@cbosofamerica.org.

20. General

• These terms, the documents they name and any signed agreement are the whole agreement between you and us about the service.
• If a court or arbitrator finds part of these terms cannot be enforced, the rest stays in force.
• If we do not enforce a term once, we may still enforce it later.
• You may not transfer your rights under these terms without our written consent. We may transfer ours to an organization that takes over the program and keeps these promises.
• We send notices to the email on your account. Send notices to us at legal@cbosofamerica.org or to the address below.
• You agree that we may give you notices and records electronically.
• California users. The service is provided by the William H. Douglas Foundation, 215 South Robertson Blvd. #307, Beverly Hills, CA 90211. Prices are set out in section 3. You may contact the Complaint Assistance Unit of the Division of Consumer Services of the California Department of Consumer Affairs in writing at 1625 North Market Blvd., Suite N 112, Sacramento, CA 95834, or by phone at (800) 952-5210.

21. Changes to these terms

When these terms change we post the new version here with a new date. If a change affects your rights, we email account holders at least 30 days before it takes effect and ask you to agree again when you next sign in. A change never applies to a dispute that began before it. If you do not agree, you can stop using the service, and an organization that has paid for a year can ask for a refund of the unused part.