Transparency & Accountability

Purpose. Save the Animals Inc ("Save the Animals") welcomes gifts that advance its mission to protect wildlife and wild places. This policy guides the organization, its board, staff, volunteers, and donors on the types of gifts we accept and the review certain gifts require. It protects both the donor's intent and the organization's ability to use each gift effectively.

Gifts we accept without prior review

• Cash and cash equivalents — including checks, credit and debit cards, ACH, and online gifts processed through our payment partner.
• Publicly traded securities — marketable stocks, bonds, and mutual fund shares, normally sold promptly upon receipt.
• Recurring gifts and memberships, including monthly giving.

Gifts requiring review before acceptance

The following gifts are accepted only after review, because they may carry cost, liability, or restrictions that must be evaluated first:

• In-kind gifts of goods or services (valued and accepted only when they serve the mission).
• Cryptocurrency and other digital assets, normally converted to cash on receipt.
• Real estate, vehicles, and tangible personal property.
• Closely held or restricted securities and other illiquid assets.
• Planned and deferred gifts — bequests, beneficiary designations, charitable trusts, and similar arrangements.
• Gifts with donor-imposed restrictions or conditions on their use.

Review and the right to decline

Reviewable gifts are considered by our gift review group, which weighs mission alignment, cost, risk, and marketability. Save the Animals reserves the right to decline any gift that is inconsistent with its mission and values, would create undue administrative burden or financial or legal liability, or carries restrictions we cannot reasonably honor.

Donor's own advisors

Save the Animals does not provide tax, legal, or financial advice. Donors are urged to consult their own professional advisors before making a gift of securities, real estate, a planned gift, or any other non-cash asset.

Valuation, acknowledgment, and receipts

We provide a contemporaneous written acknowledgment for every gift as required by the IRS. Donors are responsible for determining the value of non-cash gifts for their own tax purposes; for gifts of property, the donor is responsible for any required appraisal and IRS Form 8283, and Save the Animals will complete the donee section where applicable. We do not assign value to in-kind gifts on a donor's behalf.

Restricted gifts

Gifts may be unrestricted or designated for a specific program. We honor reasonable donor restrictions that fit our mission; where a restricted purpose becomes impractical, we will contact the donor or apply the gift to the closest available purpose consistent with the original intent.

Gifts directed to reserves and partner programs

Gifts are made to Save the Animals, Inc., a U.S. 501(c)(3). When you choose a reserve (through Wild Eyes) or a partner program, we use that choice to direct your gift, and we honor it. Save the Animals keeps full discretion and control over all funds. If a reserve or program cannot receive or use its funds — for example, it hasn't claimed them within 24 months of the gift, no longer meets our partner requirements, or can't be paid lawfully — we may redirect them to another reserve or conservation program with the same purpose.

Save the Animals respects the privacy of every donor and supporter. This policy explains what we collect, how we use it, and the choices you have.

What we collect

When you give, sign up for updates, or shop with us, we collect the information you provide — such as your name, email, mailing address, and gift details. Payments are processed by our payment partner (Stripe); we do not store your full card number on our systems.

How we use it

• To process your gift or order and send you a receipt.
• To thank you, keep you informed about our work, and, with your consent, send occasional updates.
• To meet legal, tax, and accounting requirements.

We do not sell or share your data

Save the Animals does not sell, rent, trade, or share donor lists or personal information with any other organization for their own use. We share information only with trusted service providers who help us operate (such as payment and email providers), and only as needed to perform that service.

Your choices

• You may opt out of our communications at any time using the unsubscribe link or by emailing us.
• You may request that your gift be recognized anonymously.
• You may ask us to correct or delete your personal information, subject to records we must keep by law.

Website and analytics

Our site uses privacy-preserving analytics that stay off until you opt in, and we honor Global Privacy Control signals. We never place personal information in web addresses or share it with advertisers.

Contact

Questions about your data? Email todd@savetheanimals.shop.

Save the Animals endorses the Donor Bill of Rights. Philanthropy is built on trust, and every donor has the right:

• To be informed of the organization's mission, the way it intends to use donated resources, and its capacity to use those donations effectively for their intended purposes.
• To be informed of the identity of those serving on the organization's governing board, and to expect the board to exercise prudent judgment in its stewardship responsibilities.
• To have access to the organization's most recent financial statements.
• To be assured their gifts will be used for the purposes for which they were given.
• To receive appropriate acknowledgment and recognition.
• To be assured that information about their donations is handled with respect and confidentiality to the extent provided by law.
• To expect that all relationships with individuals representing the organization will be professional in nature.
• To be informed whether those seeking donations are volunteers, employees of the organization, or hired solicitors.
• To have the opportunity for their names to be deleted from mailing lists the organization may intend to share.
• To feel free to ask questions when making a donation, and to receive prompt, truthful, and forthright answers.

Directors, officers, and key staff of Save the Animals owe a duty of loyalty to the organization and must act in its best interests, not their own.

• Disclosure. Anyone with a financial or personal interest in a proposed transaction or arrangement must disclose it, along with all material facts.
• Recusal. An interested person may answer questions but must leave the room for the deliberation and vote on the matter. The interested person may not participate in that decision.
• Board determination. The remaining board members decide whether the transaction is fair, reasonable, and in the organization's best interest, and whether a more advantageous arrangement is available.
• Annual statements. Directors, officers, and key staff affirm in writing each year that they have read and agree to comply with this policy.

Save the Animals requires directors, staff, and volunteers to observe high standards of ethics and law in conducting its work, and encourages anyone to report suspected wrongdoing.

• How to report. Concerns about financial impropriety, fraud, or violations of law or policy may be reported in confidence to the Board Chair or to todd@savetheanimals.shop.
• No retaliation. No one who reports a concern in good faith will face retaliation, harassment, or adverse employment consequences for doing so.
• Handling. Reports are taken seriously, investigated promptly, and kept confidential to the extent possible consistent with a fair investigation.

Save the Animals retains records for the periods required by law and good practice, and disposes of them securely thereafter. In connection with any government investigation or litigation, no relevant record may be destroyed.

• Permanent: articles of incorporation, bylaws, IRS determination letter, board minutes, and annual financial statements.
• Seven years: accounting records, bank statements, and tax filings.
• Three years: general correspondence and routine donor acknowledgments, unless a longer period applies.

Save the Animals Inc is a small nonprofit, and we don't take the cost of these tools lightly. AI systems draw real water and energy, can encode bias, and can erode trust if used carelessly — especially for an organization that depends on donor trust and scientific credibility. We are actively working through those risks, not deferring them: this policy sets out where we already draw firm lines, where AI genuinely helps our mission (faster, more consistent species identification from camera-trap photos), and how we'll keep reviewing both as the technology and its footprint evolve.

Our Guiding Principle

We adopt AI only when it measurably advances conservation outcomes, never for its own sake. Three rules govern every use:

• Mission first. A tool earns a place here by helping reserves, species, or supporters — not by being new.
• Human in the loop. No AI output reaches a reserve partner, a donor, or the public without a person reviewing it first.
• Least use necessary. We default to the smallest, most narrowly scoped tool for a job, and to no AI at all when a simpler method works as well.

How We Use AI Today

Our use is narrow and specific. Here is the complete list, by function.

Software Development — Claude Code, and Only Claude Code

Our engineering team uses Claude Code (Anthropic) to help build and maintain the Wild Eyes platform. We do not use general-purpose consumer chatbots such as ChatGPT for internal engineering work. This keeps our tooling auditable and limits how widely our codebase and data are exposed to outside systems.

We chose Anthropic in part for its stated mission to keep frontier AI development safety-focused rather than purely speed-focused, including publishing a Responsible Scaling Policy for its most capable models. We treat that as a stated intent to watch, not a guarantee, and we'll revisit this choice as the company's practice evolves.

Species Identification — Purpose-Built Models, Not Generative AI

Wild Eyes runs field photos through a two-stage pipeline on Modal's on-demand GPU infrastructure: a detector flags whether an image has an animal, then a species classifier — built on Google's SpeciesNet, an open wildlife-classification model — suggests a species. Reserves choose a terrestrial or marine model profile for their habitat.

This is a narrow, task-specific predictive model, not a generative chatbot, and we're precise about that distinction internally and in what we tell users. Every suggestion is checked against staff review and community "quick ID" consensus, and we publish per-model confidence and agreement rates so reserves can see exactly how good the AI's suggestions really are.

Marketing & Communications — Review and Ideation, Not Generation

We don't use AI to generate finished marketing copy, video, or images. Its role here is narrower: reviewing and tightening copy a person already wrote, and helping brainstorm ideas or angles early in the process. A person writes the actual words and chooses the actual visuals that go out under our name.

Where AI meaningfully shaped a piece of public content — even at the ideation or review stage — we say so, consistent with the disclosure principle we apply to AI-assisted species suggestions elsewhere on this page.

Grant Applications & Fundraising Proposals — Figures and Facts, Never AI-Touched

Grant applications carry real reputational and funding risk if something in them is wrong. AI may help with early ideation or reviewing phrasing here too, same as our other content — but every figure, project detail, and factual claim in a submitted application is human-sourced and independently verified. We do not let AI draft, estimate, or generate numbers, outcomes, or claims that go into a funding request.

What We Don't Do

• Feed donor personal information, financial data, or precise reserve/species location data into third-party AI tools, or let it be used for model training.
• Send fully AI-drafted, unreviewed messages to donors or reserve partners, or use AI to make autonomous fundraising asks.
• Publish a species identification, population estimate, or threat assessment generated by a model without human verification.
• Adopt general-purpose consumer AI chatbots for internal operations beyond the one approved engineering tool.
• Use AI in any way that could compromise the safety of a reserve, its staff, or the species it protects — including feeding out precise location data that could expose a site to poaching risk.
• Use AI to generate finished marketing copy, video, or images published under our name, or to draft or estimate figures in a grant application — outside engineering, AI's role is limited to reviewing human-created work and early-stage ideation.

Data Privacy & Security

Precise reserve and species location data, and any donor personal or financial information, are sensitive by definition — the wrong disclosure can put a place, a species, or a person's trust at risk. That data lives in Wild Eyes' own systems, under access controls, and it is never pasted into an AI tool that isn't already covered by this policy.

Before we adopt any tool that has AI built into it — a hosting platform, a database, a CRM — we check what it does with our data, whether it trains on customer data by default, and whether that can be turned off. If a vendor can't answer clearly, we don't adopt it for anything touching sensitive data.

For the full detail on what we collect, how long we keep it, and your rights, see the Wild Eyes Privacy Policy.

Environmental Responsibility

AI computation draws real electricity and, for some data centers, real water for cooling — costs that don't show up in a subscription price but are still costs. As a conservation organization, we treat that footprint as part of what we're accountable for, not a separate topic.

In practice, that means:

• Smallest tool for the job. Before adding any AI feature, we ask whether a smaller model — or no AI at all — does the work just as well; our species-classification pipeline already runs on a narrow, purpose-built model rather than a general-purpose one, and it costs a fraction of the compute.
• That pipeline runs on Modal's serverless GPU infrastructure, which scales to zero when there's no backlog — no GPUs idling between camera-trap uploads.
• Vendor and region bar. We only adopt AI or cloud vendors that publish real information about their environmental and community impact, and where we have a choice, we steer compute toward lower-carbon-intensity regions.
• Where we rely on larger general-purpose tools, like Claude Code, we favor providers who publish their environmental and safety practices, and we watch whether they live up to them.
• Telling our supporters. We use Wild Eyes' own newsletter and blog to help our community understand AI's real environmental costs — ours and the industry's — because conservation literacy should include this.
• We revisit this section as providers publish better data and as more efficient options become available. Our aim is to keep shrinking this footprint, not just hold it steady.

On offsetting. We don't buy carbon credits reflexively — at our scale they're more symbolic than substantive, and reducing use plus disclosing it honestly matters more. Two things are still true. First, Anthropic, the AI vendor we already use, buys durable carbon-removal credits for its own operations through the Frontier coalition; we didn't do anything to earn that, and we're not counting it as our own achievement, just naming it accurately. Second, as budget allows, we intend to put a small, fixed amount toward two things: a direct carbon-removal purchase (through a marketplace like Patch or Puro.earth) sized to a rough estimate of our own AI compute, and support for habitat protection at a reserve already in our network, as a mission-aligned complement. Neither is funded yet — we'll note it here, with real numbers, once it is.

Societal Responsibility

AI models can be wrong, and wrong in ways that matter here: a misidentified species, an overstated threat level, a biased read on which reserve "deserves" support. We treat every AI output as a draft, not a verdict.

AI-driven job loss is a real, documented societal cost of this technology, not a hypothetical one. Our stance is deliberate: we use AI to advance our staff and rangers' ingenuity — clearing time-consuming triage so people can spend more of it on judgment calls only they can make — not to replace the people doing conservation work.

• Disclosure. Where AI or a trained model contributes to something a user or partner sees — a species suggestion, a matched resource — we label it as AI-assisted.
• Accuracy over speed. Human review comes before publication, always, even when it's slower.
• No cutting jobs over it. Efficiency gains from AI get redirected into more conservation capacity — more staff and ranger time in the field, not fewer roles on the team.
• Community, not just crowdsourcing. Field identifications still rely on staff review and community "quick ID" consensus by design — we treat that as citizen participation worth preserving, not overhead to automate away.
• Accessibility. Any AI-assisted feature in Wild Eyes is built to remain usable by reserves with limited connectivity or technical capacity — we don't let AI adoption widen that gap.
• Where the compute lives. Large data centers built to serve AI demand can strain local power grids, water supplies, and land use in the communities that host them. We don't operate our own data centers, but we factor this into which cloud and AI vendors we use, and we say so plainly here rather than treating it as someone else's problem.

Governance & Accountability

Adopting any new AI tool, or a new use of an existing one, goes through a leadership review before it ships — bigger or more public-facing changes get more scrutiny. We review this policy at least once a year, or sooner if a new tool, incident, or regulation calls for it. As part of that review, we update a short, current list of which AI and compute vendors we're actually using — right here in this document. That's our disclosure mechanism, deliberately simple rather than a separate report nobody reads.

Staff or volunteers with a concern about how we're using AI can raise it directly with our leadership. Reserve partners, donors, or the public can reach us at todd@savetheanimals.shop with questions about this policy or how it applies to something they've seen from us.

Current AI and compute vendors (updated with each annual review): Anthropic (Claude Code, internal engineering), Modal (species-classification compute).

This Policy Will Keep Changing

This is a working document, not a finished one. AI capabilities, the risks they carry, and their environmental cost are all moving targets, and this policy will move with them. Check back for updates, and don't hesitate to ask us how a specific feature works — we'd rather explain it than have you guess.