Privacy Policy

Encore is operated by Ryan Pike, trading as Encore, based in South Africa. We are the responsible party for the personal information described on this page. You can reach us at hello@encore.gift.

• The organizer’s name, email address and phone number.
• Storytellers’ names and email addresses.
• The letters, photos and voice notes storytellers submit for a campaign.
• Payment confirmation details, such as amount and status. We never see or store card numbers; those go straight to Paystack.
• Basic usage analytics, such as which pages are visited.

If you are a storyteller, your name and email address were given to us by the campaign’s organizer, so we could invite you to take part. We use them only to send that invitation and any reminders for that campaign.

This page is linked from those invitations, so you always know how your information is being handled.

We use this information to run the campaign: to send invitations and reminders to storytellers on the organizer’s behalf, to collect and safely store what they submit, to build and deliver the reveal, to process payment, and to provide support if something goes wrong along the way. Payment metadata is used only to confirm your campaign has been paid for and to help with any refund request.

We do not use your information for anything beyond running Encore. We do not sell it, and we do not use it to advertise to you or anyone else.

We use a small number of trusted service providers to run Encore. Each only receives the information it needs to do its job.

• Vercel, which hosts the Encore website.
• Supabase, which holds our database.
• Cloudflare R2, which stores uploaded photos and voice notes.
• Paystack, which processes payments.
• Resend, which sends our transactional emails, such as invitations and reminders.
• PostHog (EU), which gives us basic product analytics.
• Cloudflare Turnstile, which helps keep bots off our forms.

Some of these providers store and process information outside South Africa, including in the European Union and the United States. We choose providers with strong privacy and security practices, who are bound by their own data protection obligations. Our analytics provider, PostHog, is hosted in the EU.

Encore uses session replay through PostHog to understand how the site is used, but every letter and story is masked before it is ever recorded. We never capture the actual words a storyteller writes, or the contents of a private letter, in analytics or session replay.

Campaign content, meaning the letters, photos and voice notes storytellers submit, is kept for the hosting period of that campaign: at least 12 months from unlock, and longer for some occasions. Before that period ends, we offer the organizer a download of everything and the option to extend hosting, so nothing is lost without warning.

After the hosting period ends, or sooner if the organizer asks us to, we delete the campaign’s content from our systems. Basic account and billing records may be kept a little longer where we are required to for accounting purposes.

Under South Africa’s Protection of Personal Information Act, you have the right to ask what personal information we hold about you, to have it corrected if it is wrong, to have it deleted, and to object to how it is being used. To exercise any of these rights, email hello@encore.gift.

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your personal information, you also have the right to complain to South Africa’s Information Regulator.

You can reach the Information Regulator at inforegulator.org.za or lodge a complaint by email at POPIAComplaints@inforegulator.org.za.

Encore keeps cookies to a minimum: a functional session cookie so the site works properly, and PostHog analytics cookies so we can see how the site is used. We do not use advertising cookies.