Frequently asked questions.

NAR is a nonprofit registry of Albanians and their descendants in the United States. Registrants sign up, get counted, and receive a numbered Certificate of Albanian Identity. The U.S. Census recorded ~224,000 Albanian Americans in 2024; community estimates put the real number near ~1,000,000. NAR exists to close that gap with a verifiable, community-held count.

Eight Albanian-American volunteers across six states. The President is Ervin Toro (born in Fier, arrived in New York at 13). The other officers are Erold Merko (Treasurer, Michigan), Nalvi Duro (Secretary, Florida), and Iliriana Sela (Director of Community Outreach, New York). The full board is on /about#team.

No. NAR has no affiliation with the U.S. government, the Albanian government, any consulate, or any embassy. It's a private nonprofit, started and run by community volunteers. That separation is what makes the count trustworthy — government counts have historically under-recorded us.

NAR is filed as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit; the IRS determination letter is pending (filed 2026). Until determination lands, donations are not yet tax-deductible — that flips the day the letter is issued and applies retroactively per IRS rules. The Form 990 will publish annually starting the first fiscal year after determination.

Federal funding, scholarships, language services, and civic recognition flow toward groups that can produce a real population count. Albanian Americans haven't had one. The ACS estimate (224K) is roughly a quarter of what the community knows is here. Without a credible number, every funder, university, and city council defaults to the undercount.

Three things. First, publish aggregate statistics — by state, generation, language — so anyone can cite a real number. Second, route funding and partnership conversations through the registry so they reflect actual diaspora scale. Third, give every registrant a permanent record of their place in that count, transferable to children.

Those organizations do membership, advocacy, and chapter work — important and complementary. NAR is the count layer underneath them. We aren't competing for members; we're publishing the population denominator they (and everyone else) can cite. Several NAR officers also serve in AANO chapters.

No. NAR doesn't endorse candidates, parties, or partisan campaigns. The bylaws restrict political activity to nonpartisan civic-data publication. Politically active members route to the Advisory Board (/advisory) where policy input is welcome but kept separate from the Managing Board's fiduciary work.

Anyone of Albanian heritage — Albania proper, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Çamëria, Arbëreshë — and the U.S.-born descendants of all of them. The full Albanian diaspora. You don't need to live in the U.S. to register, but the count is U.S.-focused for now.

Yes. Albanian identity is heritage, not blood quantum. Half, quarter, one Albanian grandparent — all count. The Census under-recorded mixed-heritage Albanian Americans for decades because the category was buried under "White" on most forms. Registering corrects that.

Yes. Second-, third-, and fourth-generation Albanian Americans are the largest under-counted group. If one of your great-grandparents was Albanian, you can register.

Yes. NAR counts the full Albanian diaspora, not citizens of Albania alone. Albanians from Kosovo, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Çamëria, and the Arbëreshë communities of southern Italy are all welcome.

Yes. Citizenship status doesn't affect eligibility. Registration is a private heritage record, not an immigration document. NAR does not share registrant data with USCIS, ICE, DHS, CBP, or any consulate — see the privacy section below.

Most of NAR's federal-recognition work is U.S.-focused, so the registry primarily counts Albanian Americans. Non-U.S. residents are welcome to register; international chapters (NAR UK, NAR Italy, NAR Canada) are on the roadmap once the U.S. count stabilizes.

Yes. The household feature lets one adult register dependents under their account. Each dependent gets their own numbered certificate. Heads of household can also correct a dependent's name later — see /account.

Family is family. If you were raised in an Albanian household and identify as Albanian American, you can register. The eligibility question is about whether you are part of this community — not a genetic test.

Two to three minutes. The form has six required fields (name, email, ZIP, generation, country of origin, consent) and an optional household section. After submit you get a magic-link email; click it and your certificate is ready.

Yes. Registration and the digital certificate are free, forever. Optional paid add-ons exist — a printed and framed certificate via our print partner, a donation to support the work — but neither is required to register or be counted.

Required: legal first and last name, email, U.S. state and ZIP, generation (1st through 4th+), Albanian country of origin (Albania / Kosovo / North Macedonia / Montenegro / Çamëria / Arbëreshë / mixed), and consent. Optional: parents' identification, language proficiency, religion (aggregated only), profession. Everything optional is clearly marked.

No. NAR is a self-attested registry — you affirm your Albanian heritage when you sign up. We do not collect passports, birth certificates, or photo IDs. The trust model is community attestation, not government verification.

Your registration number is the permanent serial assigned when you joined the count — registrant #1 is the first person to register, #500 is the 500th, and so on. The number never changes, never gets recycled, and is printed on your certificate. It's also the identifier the verifiable credential signs against.

Cohort ID is a quarterly batch tag (e.g., 2026-Q2). It groups registrants by the calendar quarter they joined, which makes historical analysis cleaner — "how did registration accelerate after the 2026 launch?" — without needing per-person dates. Your cohort is also on your certificate.

A formal printable certificate with the NAR seal, your full name, your registration number, your cohort, your state, and a QR code that verifies the document against our public ledger. Renders identically every time. Sample at /certificate.

No. The NAR certificate is a community-issued record of identity, not a government document. It does not confer Albanian citizenship, U.S. citizenship, residency, voting rights, or any legal status. Albanian citizenship by descent is governed by Albania's Citizenship Law 113/2020 — covered separately at /certificate#citizenship.

Yes. The digital PDF is print-ready at 300 DPI. Print at home or at a copy shop today. A done-for-you printed + framed option is coming soon (see next question).

Coming soon. We're in private beta with our print partner Prodigi — paper, framed, founder-tier, and gallery-mounted options will be available from /account within the next few weeks. Pricing covers print + shipping + sales tax + a modest margin that funds NAR operations (alongside sponsorships and donations). When it goes live, registrants get an email; until then the digital cert is print-ready at home.

No, the system catches duplicates two ways. A re-submit with the same email lands on the same row — email is a hard unique key in the database, so you get one record and one registration number no matter how many times you click "register." A re-submit with a different email but the same first name, last name, date of birth, and ZIP code is flagged before insert and the form prompts the registrant to confirm they're not the same person. Real twins or family members at the same address with the same first name can confirm "no, I'm different" and continue; overrides are logged for admin review. So nobody can quietly land twice — the count stays one row per real person.

Yes — go to /account, edit your first or last name, and save. Your certificate auto-regenerates with the corrected spelling immediately. No admin ticket, no waiting. You can make up to 3 name changes per 30 days; an email notification goes out on every change (security canary against account takeover).

Yes. Go to /account, expand the dependent's card under Household, and click "Fix a typo in this name." The dependent's certificate regenerates the moment you save. Same 3-per-30-days quota applies per dependent.

Three corrections per registrant in any rolling 30-day window. The cap is anti-abuse, not compliance — it prevents takeover attempts from rapidly cycling identities. If you have a real reason to exceed it (legal name change, marriage, adoption), email contact@albanianregistry.org and we'll handle it manually.

Yes. From /account, request an email change. We send a confirmation link to the new address; clicking it completes the switch. The old address gets a notification too so you'll see it if someone tries to move your account without your knowledge.

Check spam and promotions first; the sender is hello@albanianregistry.org. If it's still missing after a few minutes, request a new link from /account. If your inbox blocks the sender, add hello@albanianregistry.org to your contacts and request again.

Magic links expire after 30 minutes for security. Request a new one from the login page — old links are single-use and can't be reactivated.

Yes. State and ZIP are editable from /account. Updating them moves your registration into the new state's count immediately. No re-verification needed.

From /account, request account deletion. We confirm via email, then permanently remove your personal data — name, email, ZIP, all of it — within seven days. Your registration number is retired (never reassigned) and your aggregate count contribution is anonymized. You can also email contact@albanianregistry.org.

Yes. From /account, request a data export. We send you a JSON file with every field on your record, every change, and every audit entry. Reply latency is usually a few minutes.

Yes. Data is encrypted at rest in Supabase (AES-256), encrypted in transit (TLS 1.3), and access to identifiable records is restricted to the four officers via 2-of-N admin gating — no single person can pull a registrant list alone. The full architecture is at /privacy.

No. NAR does not share registrant data with ICE, CBP, DHS, USCIS, the IRS (beyond required nonprofit financial reporting that contains zero registrant info), the Albanian consulate, the Albanian government, or any other federal or foreign authority. Lawful subpoenas would be challenged in court and disclosed in our annual compelled-disclosure log if they ever arrived.

Only what you choose. The public sponsor wall, the referrers list (/referrers), and the methodology pages publish first-name-plus-state or aggregate stats only — no last names, no email, no address. Opt out from /account and even your first name disappears from public surfaces.

No. The bylaws prohibit selling registrant data — full stop. Any change to that rule would require a 100% Managing Board vote plus a 60-day public comment period (it's a sticky provision under Article VII). Nothing about the funding model depends on selling data.

Not from us. Your name appears on the public referrer list only if someone you referred registers AND you haven't opted out. Outside of that, your registration is private. We don't post registrant names, don't email your contacts, don't tag you anywhere.

Yes. Registrants in the EU, UK, and California have the right to access, correct, export, and delete their data — all available from /account without a ticket. The full notice (legal basis, retention, processor list) is at /privacy.

Demographics let us publish aggregate stats that funders and researchers need (e.g., "how many Albanian-American women under 30 are in Michigan?"). All of those fields are optional, all are stored separately from your name, and individual-level religion is never published — only aggregates. The methodology is documented at /methodology.

Only to aggregate statistics, never to individual records. A university researcher who wants to cite "first-generation Albanian Americans by state" can get that table; no researcher gets your row. Any future data-sharing partnership requires a 2-of-N board vote, public disclosure, and a public-comment window.

/donate. One-time or monthly, by card, Apple Pay, Google Pay, or bank transfer (ACH). Every dollar is tied to a public budget line on /governance. We don't run paid ads with donations — the spend is hosting, legal, certificate prints, and field operations.

Not yet. NAR filed for 501(c)(3) status in 2026; until the IRS issues the determination letter, donations are not tax-deductible. When the letter arrives, deductibility applies retroactively to the filing date per IRS rules, so save your donation receipts.

Apply at /sponsor. Sponsors are Albanian-owned (and Albanian-friendly) businesses that back the count financially in exchange for placement on the public sponsor wall at /sponsors. All sponsor logos are sized identically — no tiered display, no dollar amounts shown — so the wall reads as a community of backers, not a leaderboard.

The Founding Board is the eleven-seat Managing Board — voting directors with fiduciary responsibility for NAR. The contribution is $25,000 per seat, named for life. Apply at /founding-board/apply. High-touch process: written application, two references, deep COI check, board vote, then contribution.

A separate board of sector experts (business, religious, nonprofit, academia, healthcare) who advise on policy and outreach. No contribution, no fiduciary duty, no fixed seat count. Apply at /advisory. The Advisory Board is also where politically active members route to — keeping fiduciary work apolitical per the bylaws.

Regional ambassadors are state-level field organizers — they share the registry in their community, host one event a year, and help find the next ambassador. Roughly two hours a month. Full role description at /regional-leads/faq.

/regional-leads. Pick your state, fill the application, and a board member calls you for a fifteen-minute intro. Decisions usually come back within a week.

Yes. The sponsorship page is at /sponsor. Sponsorships start at $500 and scale up; every logo on the wall is identical regardless of tier. Sponsors get a public listing, the optional sponsor-of-NAR badge for their site, and the line on our budget transparency page.

Once you're registered, /account gives you a personal referral link with your name attached. Send it through WhatsApp, text, email, Instagram — every channel the registry uses. Family WhatsApp groups have been the highest-converting channel by a wide margin.

Yes. Every registrant has a unique link. People who register through your link are tied to your account, counted in your referrals tile, and visible on your account page. No payouts, no points — the count is the reward.

Bridge (5 referrals), Connector (25), Anchor (50), Catalyst (100). The tier shows next to your name on the public referrers list at /referrers. Opt out from /account if you'd rather not appear there.

From /account, the Share Card section generates a personalized image (your registration number, cohort, state) sized for Instagram and X. The image links back to /verify so people can confirm the certificate is real.

#CountMeAlbanian. Use it on Instagram, X, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn. We re-share posts that use the tag from the NAR accounts.

Instagram, Facebook, X, LinkedIn, and YouTube — links are in the global footer. The newsletter is the most reliable way to hear about the count milestones (sign up from /donate or /account).

Four officers (President, Treasurer, Secretary, Director of Community Outreach) plus four other founders make up the eight-person Executive Board. The full Managing Board adds up to eleven seats once filled. The Advisory Board sits parallel and weighs in on policy. Full org chart at /governance.

Three tiers. Managing Board: eleven founding director seats, $25,000 contribution, full vote on bylaws and budgets. Executive Board: the eight original founders, all volunteer, operational responsibility. Advisory Board: open application, sector-based, no contribution, votes only on advisory matters. Each tier has its own apply path at /founding-board and /advisory.

Every consequential action — admin invites, budget changes, bylaws amendments, dissolution — requires 2-of-N approval from the Managing Board, recorded in an append-only audit log. No officer has unilateral authority. The President chairs meetings and signs IRS-required documents; that's the scope of the role. The decisions feed publishes at /governance automatically.

Yes. The current budget by line item is published at /governance. Once IRS determination lands, the Form 990 will publish annually. Every donation, sponsorship, and reimbursable expense ties back to a budget line.

Minutes and decisions are public. Live meetings are board-only by default for candid discussion; minutes publish to /governance after each meeting. Whistleblower and HR matters are filtered from public view per the bylaws.

Every Managing and Advisory Board member files an annual Conflict-of-Interest disclosure (employer, family, partisan affiliations, other nonprofit boards). The disclosures are visible to the rest of the board. Any vote where a member has a conflict requires recusal, logged in the audit trail.

Article IX of the bylaws governs dissolution: a 100% Managing Board vote, a 60-day public comment period, and final disposition of registrant data per the privacy policy (deleted or transferred to a successor nonprofit by registrant consent). Once dissolved, the app goes hard read-only — registrants can still verify their certificates indefinitely, but no further writes are permitted.