Terms of Use

These Terms of Use (the “Terms”) govern your access to and use of Spark Poll, the live-polling web application and related websites, software, features, and content (collectively, the “Service”) operated by Close the Gap Foundation, a California 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation (“Spark Poll,” “we,” “our,” or “us”).

The Service includes two distinct kinds of users: Presenters (people who create an account and run polling sessions) and Respondents (people who join a session, typically through a 6-digit code or QR link, and submit answers without creating an account). These Terms apply to both. Where a section applies only to one, we say so.

By accessing or using the Service, you agree to be bound by these Terms and by our Privacy Policy, which is incorporated by reference. If you do not agree, do not use the Service.

You may use the Service if you can form a binding contract with CTG under applicable law and are not barred from using the Service under the laws of your jurisdiction.

Age

Presenters must be at least 13 years old to create an account. If you are between 13 and 18 (or the age of majority where you live), you represent that your parent or legal guardian has reviewed and agreed to these Terms on your behalf, or that you are using the Service under the supervision of a school, club, or organization that has done so.

Respondentsmay join a session at any age the session's Presenter permits under their own institutional rules. The Service itself does not collect names, accounts, or contact information from Respondents (see the Privacy Policy for the full list of what we do collect). Where a Respondent is a child, the responsibility for collecting any required parental consent for the underlying classroom or program rests with the Presenter and their organization.

Schools, organizations, and agency

If you use the Service on behalf of a school, district, business, or other organization, you represent that you have authority to bind that organization to these Terms, and “you” refers to both you individually and that organization.

To create or manage polling content, you must register a Presenter account using a valid email address. We authenticate accounts using a passwordless “magic link” sent to that email. You are responsible for:

• Keeping your email account secure. Anyone who can access your email can sign into your Spark Poll account.
• All activity that occurs under your account, including content you create and sessions you run.
• Promptly notifying us at info@closethegapfoundation.org if you suspect unauthorized access.

You may end a session, delete a presentation that has no associated sessions, or sign out at any time from your dashboard. To request deletion of your entire account or of historical session data, contact us at the email above. We will respond to verified requests within a reasonable time frame consistent with our retention practices described in the Privacy Policy.

Spark Poll lets Presenters build presentations made up of one or more interactive slides. We currently support six slide types: multiple choice, word cloud, open-ended response, scales, ranking, and pin-on-map.

When a Presenter starts a session, the Service generates a 6-digit join code and a corresponding QR-code URL. Respondents enter the code or scan the QR to join, submit their answers, and see live results when the Presenter has chosen to share them.

Sessions are time-limited. By default a session's join code remains active for approximately two days after creation and is then automatically marked as expired. Underlying response data is retained according to the schedule described in the Privacy Policy unless and until you delete it or request deletion.

We continuously develop and refine the Service. We may add, modify, remove, or reorganize features (including poll types, presentation themes, results views, and administrative tools) at any time. We will make a reasonable effort to communicate material changes that affect existing content.

“User Content” means any content you create, upload, submit, or transmit through the Service, including presentation titles, slide questions and configurations, theme metadata, poll responses (text, numeric, ordering, and geographic location), and feedback you send us.

You retain ownership

As between you and CTG, you retain all rights you had in your User Content before you submitted it. We claim no ownership over your User Content.

License you grant to CTG

To operate, provide, secure, study, and improve the Service — and to advance our charitable and educational mission as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit — you grant CTG a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, fully paid-up, transferable, sublicensable, and perpetual license to host, store, reproduce, modify, adapt, create derivative works of, publish, publicly perform, publicly display, transmit, and otherwise use your User Content for the following purposes:

• Operating the Service. Storing your content, displaying it to your intended audience (Presenters to the audiences they choose; Respondents to the Presenter and other participants of the same session, where the slide is configured to share responses), and delivering related features.
• Securing and maintaining the Service. Detecting abuse, debugging, preventing harm, and complying with legal obligations.
• Improving the Service. Analyzing aggregate and anonymized usage and content patterns to make Spark Poll faster, more accurate, more accessible, and more useful.
• Research, statistics, and the Foundation's mission. Using aggregate and de-identifiedUser Content for educational research, publications, and program evaluation aligned with Close the Gap Foundation's mission of empowering first-generation and low-income students. We will not publish any individual response in a way that identifies you.
• Training and evaluating machine-learning models. We may use User Content — primarily in aggregate or de-identified form — to develop, train, test, and improve statistical and machine-learning systems that power features of the Service (for example, summarization of open-ended answers, profanity detection, language detection, accessible visualizations, and anti-abuse). We will not use the content of an individually identifiable response to train a general-purpose system that produces outputs identifying you.

This license continues for any User Content you have made publicly available within a session, and for backup, archival, aggregate-analytics, and legal-compliance copies thereafter, even if you later delete the underlying content from your dashboard. For all other purposes, this license terminates a reasonable time after you delete the content or your account.

Your warranties

By submitting User Content, you represent and warrant that:

• You own the content or have all rights, licenses, consents, and permissions necessary to grant the license above.
• Your content, and our use of it as described, does not infringe or violate the rights of any third party (including intellectual-property, privacy, publicity, and contract rights) and complies with all applicable laws.
• If you are a Presenter collecting answers from minors or from people in a workplace, classroom, or other regulated environment, you have obtained any consents and provided any notices that the law of your jurisdiction requires.

When you join a session by entering a 6-digit code or scanning a QR link, your participation is voluntary. The Service assigns your device a random, opaque token (stored in your browser's local storage) so we can prevent duplicate submissions and reconnect you if you refresh. We do not ask for your name, email, phone number, or government identifier.

Your answers are visible to the session's Presenter and may be aggregated and displayed to other participants of the same session if the Presenter has enabled live sharing of responses for that slide.

By submitting an answer you grant the license described in Section 5 with respect to that answer, and you confirm that the content of your answer does not violate the Acceptable Use rules below.

You agree not to use the Service to:

• Post, share, or transmit content that is unlawful, defamatory, obscene, sexually explicit, harassing, threatening, hateful, or that incites violence or self-harm.
• Harass, bully, intimidate, stalk, or target any person or group, including by running polls designed to humiliate or single out individuals.
• Infringe the intellectual-property, privacy, publicity, contract, or other rights of any person or entity.
• Collect personal information about Respondents without providing clear notice and obtaining any consent required by law in your jurisdiction.
• Solicit or collect from minors any personal information beyond what the Service itself collects, unless you have verifiable parental consent under applicable law (e.g., COPPA, FERPA, GDPR-K).
• Send spam, chain letters, phishing attempts, malware, or other malicious code, or use the Service to facilitate any of the foregoing.
• Probe, scan, or test the vulnerability of the Service or any connected system; attempt to defeat any access or rate controls; or access the Service or its underlying infrastructure through any means other than the interfaces and APIs we provide.
• Reverse engineer, decompile, or attempt to extract source code from any part of the Service, except to the limited extent applicable law expressly permits.
• Scrape, crawl, or harvest content or data from the Service in bulk except through interfaces we provide for that purpose.
• Resell, rent, or commercially redistribute access to the Service or any data obtained through it, except as expressly permitted in writing by CTG.
• Use the Service in any manner that could damage, disable, overburden, or impair our systems or networks, or interfere with any other party's use of the Service.
• Violate any applicable law or regulation in your use of the Service.

We may, at our discretion and without notice, remove content, throttle requests, suspend or terminate sessions or accounts, and report activity to law-enforcement or other authorities to enforce these rules or to comply with the law.

Our Privacy Policy describes what information we collect, how we use it, when we share it, and the choices you have. By using the Service you agree to the data practices described in that policy.

The Service is offered to Presenters today on a free tier. We do not collect a credit card to create an account, we do not charge based on audience size, and we do not impose a trial period that auto-converts to paid.

We may, in the future, introduce optional paid features (“Pro Features”). If we do, paid features will be clearly marked, will require your affirmative opt-in, and will be governed by additional terms presented at the time of purchase. The features available to you as part of today's free tier will remain available on a free tier (we may rename or restructure tiers, but we will not retroactively paywall functionality you currently rely on without offering a reasonable transition path).

We may also introduce optional features that depend on costs we incur from third parties (for example, large-scale exports, extended storage, or hosted media). In those cases we may require a paid plan, an organizational sponsorship, or analogous arrangement to use those specific features.

The Service, including the Spark Poll name and logo, the interface, source code, designs, copy, documentation, and all related intellectual-property rights, are owned by CTG or our licensors and are protected by United States and international intellectual-property laws.

Subject to your compliance with these Terms, we grant you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable license to access and use the Service for its intended purpose. No other rights are granted by implication, estoppel, or otherwise.

You may not remove or alter any proprietary notices on the Service. The trademarks and logos of third parties referenced on the Service are the property of their respective owners.

We welcome your ideas, comments, suggestions, and feedback about the Service (“Feedback”). If you send us Feedback, you grant CTG a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, fully paid-up, sublicensable, and perpetual license to use, reproduce, distribute, create derivative works of, and otherwise exploit your Feedback for any purpose, without compensation or attribution to you. This lets us build what users ask for without needing to track who asked for what.

The Service runs on infrastructure provided by third parties, including Supabase, Inc. (database, authentication, and realtime messaging) and Vercel Inc. (hosting and serverless execution). These providers act as our service providers and process information on our behalf as described in the Privacy Policy. Their availability, performance, and policies are outside our direct control.

The Service may also link to third-party websites (for example, the Close the Gap Foundation website). We are not responsible for the content, accuracy, or practices of those sites.

You may stop using the Service at any time and may delete eligible content from your dashboard. You may also request account deletion at info@closethegapfoundation.org.

We may, in our reasonable discretion and without prior notice, suspend, restrict, or terminate your access to the Service (in whole or in part) if:

• You materially breach these Terms;
• Your activity creates risk or potential legal exposure for CTG, our users, or third parties;
• We are required to do so by law, regulation, or order of a competent authority; or
• We discontinue the Service or any feature, in whole or in part.

Upon termination, your right to use the Service ends. Sections that by their nature should survive termination — including Section 5 (license), Section 10 (intellectual property), Section 11 (feedback), Section 14 (disclaimers), Section 15 (limitation of liability), Section 16 (indemnification), and Section 17 (disputes) — survive.

THE SERVICE IS PROVIDED “AS IS” AND “AS AVAILABLE,” WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, WHETHER EXPRESS, IMPLIED, OR STATUTORY. TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, CTG, ITS AFFILIATES, AND ITS LICENSORS DISCLAIM ALL WARRANTIES, INCLUDING THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE, AND NON-INFRINGEMENT, AS WELL AS ANY WARRANTIES ARISING OUT OF COURSE OF DEALING OR USAGE OF TRADE.

CTG DOES NOT WARRANT THAT THE SERVICE WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED, TIMELY, SECURE, ERROR-FREE, OR FREE OF VIRUSES OR OTHER HARMFUL COMPONENTS; THAT DEFECTS WILL BE CORRECTED; OR THAT THE RESULTS OBTAINED FROM USE OF THE SERVICE WILL BE ACCURATE OR RELIABLE.

ANY CONTENT YOU OBTAIN THROUGH THE SERVICE IS OBTAINED AT YOUR OWN DISCRETION AND RISK, AND YOU ARE SOLELY RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY DAMAGE RESULTING FROM YOUR USE OF SUCH CONTENT.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties. In those jurisdictions, the above exclusions apply only to the maximum extent permitted by law.

TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, CTG, ITS DIRECTORS, OFFICERS, EMPLOYEES, VOLUNTEERS, CONTRACTORS, AGENTS, AND LICENSORS WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, OR FOR ANY LOSS OF PROFITS, REVENUES, DATA, GOODWILL, OR OTHER INTANGIBLE LOSSES, RESULTING FROM:

• Your access to, use of, or inability to access or use the Service;
• Any conduct or content of any third party on the Service, including content posted by other users;
• Any unauthorized access to or alteration of your transmissions or content; or
• Any other matter arising out of or related to the Service.

CTG'S TOTAL CUMULATIVE LIABILITY ARISING OUT OF OR RELATING TO THESE TERMS OR THE SERVICE WILL NOT EXCEED THE GREATER OF (a) the total amount you have paid to CTG for the Service in the twelve (12) months preceding the event giving rise to the claim (which, for free-tier users, is zero), or (b) one hundred United States dollars (US$100).

The limitations in this Section apply whether the alleged liability is based on contract, tort, negligence, strict liability, or any other basis, and even if CTG has been advised of the possibility of such damages.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion or limitation of incidental or consequential damages. In those jurisdictions, our liability is limited to the smallest amount permitted by law.

To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, you agree to defend, indemnify, and hold harmless CTG and its directors, officers, employees, volunteers, contractors, agents, and licensors from and against any claims, liabilities, damages, losses, costs, and expenses (including reasonable attorneys' fees) arising out of or in any way connected with:

• Your User Content;
• Your use of or access to the Service;
• Your violation of these Terms;
• Your violation of any rights of another (including any warranty you made in Section 5); or
• Your violation of any applicable law, rule, or regulation, including data-protection or education-records laws relating to people who interact with your sessions.

CTG reserves the right, at our own expense, to assume the exclusive defense and control of any matter otherwise subject to indemnification by you, in which event you will cooperate with us in asserting any available defenses.

These Terms and any dispute or claim arising out of or in connection with them or their subject matter (including non-contractual disputes and claims) are governed by, and construed in accordance with, the laws of the State of California, United States of America, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules.

The state and federal courts located in San Mateo County, California have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Service, and you consent to the personal jurisdiction of those courts. Nothing in this Section prevents either party from seeking injunctive or other equitable relief in any court of competent jurisdiction to protect its intellectual-property rights.

We prefer to resolve disputes informally. Before filing a claim, please contact us at info@closethegapfoundation.org with a description of the issue. Many disputes can be resolved this way.

We may update these Terms from time to time. When we make material changes, we will revise the “Last updated” date at the top and, where appropriate, provide additional notice (for example, an in-product banner or an email to registered Presenters). Your continued use of the Service after the new Terms take effect constitutes acceptance of those Terms. If you do not agree, your remedy is to stop using the Service and, if you wish, delete your account.

Entire agreement

These Terms (together with the Privacy Policy and any additional terms presented at the time you use a specific feature) constitute the entire agreement between you and CTG regarding the Service, and supersede any prior agreements on the same subject matter.

Severability

If any provision of these Terms is held to be invalid or unenforceable, the remaining provisions will remain in full force and effect, and the unenforceable provision will be modified to the minimum extent necessary to make it enforceable, preserving as much of its original intent as possible.

Waiver

Our failure to enforce any right or provision of these Terms will not be deemed a waiver of that right or provision.

Assignment

You may not assign these Terms or any of your rights under them without our prior written consent. We may assign these Terms in connection with a merger, reorganization, consolidation, sale of substantially all related assets, or similar transaction, or to any of our affiliates.

Relationship of the parties

No agency, partnership, joint venture, or employment relationship is created between you and CTG as a result of these Terms or your use of the Service.

Notices

We may provide notices to you by email to the address on file for your account, by posting within the Service, or by any other reasonable means. You may provide notices to us by email at info@closethegapfoundation.org.

Force majeure

CTG is not liable for any failure or delay in performance to the extent caused by conditions beyond our reasonable control, including acts of God, natural disasters, war, terrorism, civil unrest, labor disputes, internet or utility outages, or actions of governmental authorities.

Contact

Close the Gap Foundation
Attn: Spark Poll Legal
Email: info@closethegapfoundation.org