Privacy Policy

1. Introduction

At Stokenchurch Dog Rescue, we are committed to protecting your privacy. This Policy explains how and why we use your personal data (i.e. any information which identifies you, or which can be identified as relating to you personally), to ensure that you remain informed and in control at all times. We will never sell your personal data. We will only ever share it with organisations who help us deliver our projects where strictly necessary and only if they comply fully with data protection law.

Please read this privacy policy together with any other information that we may provide on specific occasions when we ask to collect or process your personal data so that you are fully aware of how and why we are using it. 

 

How to Contact us

If you are a Stokenchurch Dog Rescue supporter and would like to update the personal data we hold about you or wish to opt-out of receiving communications from us, you can let us know by writing to the: -  

 

The Data Protection Officer Stokenchurch Dog Rescue

Tower Farm

Oxford Road

Stokenchurch

Bucks

HP14 3TD

 

Any questions?

If you have any data protection questions in relation to this Policy, about how we use your personal data in general, or if you would like to make a request to exercise any of the rights you have over your personal data (see section 11 of this policy for more details), please send them to the Data Protection Officer at Stokenchurch Dog Rescue. The Data Protection Officer can be contacted by e-mailing admin@stokenchurchdogrescue.org.uk, calling 01494 482695 or in writing to the address shown above. 

 

2.      Information We Collect About You

2.1    Personal data you provide

We collect the personal data you provide to us. This includes information you give when you sign up for our newsletter, make a donation, volunteer with us, contact us about a dog for rehoming or bring your dog to us or to a veterinary practice with which we work in partnership, or request dog care advice, register or participate in an event, purchase goods or services, or send an email to us.

The personal data we collect may include:

  • personal details (name, date of birth, email, address, telephone etc);
  • financial information (payment information such as credit/debit card or direct debit details, and whether donations are gift-aided); and
  • details of your preferences and interests e.g. which breed type you are most interested in.

If you sponsor a pet as a gift for someone else or are the parent of one of our younger volunteers, your details will be recorded, as will your relationship with that person. 

 

2.2   Personal Data Created Through Your Involvement With Us

Your activities and involvement with Stokenchurch Dog Rescue will result in personal data about you being created. This may include details of dogs you have rehomed, how you have helped us as a volunteer, and your involvement with one of our appeals. If you decide to donate to us, we will keep a record of when, how much you have donated, and through what medium e.g. an appeal, sponsoring a dog or via a charitable trust. If you choose to Gift Aid with a donation to us, then we will ask for your address and UK taxpayer status as this information is needed to fulfil our obligations under tax and charity law.  It will also be shared with HMRC for tax regulation purposes.

2.3   Personal Data We Generate

From time to time, we conduct research and analysis on the information we hold, which can in turn generate personal data. For example, by analysing your interests and involvement with our work we may be able to build a profile which helps us decide which types of communication are most likely to interest you. Section 6 contains more information about how we use information for profiling and targeted communications.

 2.4  Information From Third Parties

We sometimes receive personal data about individuals from third parties such as vet practices and other animal welfare organisations with whom we work to rehome pets and to provide veterinary services. If you participate in an event organised by an external party or make a donation through a donation aggregator like Just Giving, then they may pass personal data about you to us. Also, as explained in Section 6 we may use third parties to help us conduct research and analysis on personal data which can result in new personal data being created.

2.5   Special Categories of Personal data

We do not normally collect any special categories of personal data about you, such as your race or ethnicity, religious or philosophical beliefs, sex life, sexual orientation, political opinions, trade union membership, information about your health and genetic and biometric data. Nor do we collect any information about criminal offences and convictions. However, there are some situations where we will collect special categories of personal data such as your health if you are participating in a fundraising activity. If we do need to collect this sort of data, we’ll take extra care to ensure that your privacy rights are protected. 

2.6   Accidents or Incidents

If an accident or incident occurs on our property or involves one of our staff (including volunteers), our record of what happened and the action we have taken as a result may include personal data and special categories of personal data.

2.7   Volunteers

Our volunteers are incredibly important to Stokenchurch Dog Rescue. If you wish to find out more about what personal data we collect from them and how we use it, please see our Volunteer Privacy Policy.

3.      How We Use Personal Data

We only ever use your personal data with your consent, or where it is necessary in order to:

  • enter into, or perform, a contract with you such as when you adopt a dog
  • comply with a legal duty such as under the gift aid scheme where we are required to inform you of proceeds from fundraising events such as table tops, or street collections
  • protect your vital interests for example in a life or death situation; or
  • for our own (or a third party’s) legitimate interests, provided your rights don’t override these for example sending direct marketing communications by post unless you tell us that you don’t want to receive them from us.

In any event, we’ll only use your information for the purpose or purposes it was collected for (or else for closely related purposes). 

3.1   Administration

We use personal data for administrative purposes, i.e. to carry on our charitable work. These include:

  • sending appointment reminders to clients for neutering, or inoculations of puppies
  • if you participate in an event organised by us, keeping you updated;
  • processing donations and gift-aid declarations;
  • managing feedback and complaints;
  • maintaining databases of our volunteers and donors, e.g. to make sure that the personal data they contain is accurate and up to date;
  • fulfilling orders for goods or services, whether placed online, over the phone or in-person;
  • helping us respect your choices and preferences, e.g. if you ask not to receive marketing communications, we will keep a record of this); 
  • asking you to take part in a survey, or enabling you to participate in a prize draw or competition 

 

3.2   Using Your Information To Enforce and Comply with the Law

We must ensure our activities comply with the law. Therefore we may need to share your personal data if we are required to do so by law, e.g.in connection with a court order. We may use your personal data for other purposes such as fraud prevention, complying with money laundering regulations and protecting people’s rights, property or safety. 

If certain levels of financial donations are made, the Fundraising Regulator’s Code of Fundraising Practice requires all charities in the UK to perform certain checks regarding the individual who has made the donation. More details can be found at www.fundraisingregulator.org.uk. 

Please note that we may process your personal data without your knowledge or consent where this is required or permitted by law.

3.3   Our Legitimate Interests

We may process your personal data on the basis of our legitimate interests, provided that your fundamental rights do not override those interests. Our legitimate interests are:

  • to keep our records updated;
  • to administer our relationship with you;
  • to determine how our limited resources might be used in the most effective way;
  • to protect our security, guard against fraud and other wrongdoing; and
  • to inform our communications and maximise support engagement and participation

3.4    Who We Share Your Personal Information With And Why

We take all reasonable efforts to keep your details safe and secure and will only share them with suppliers or professional agents working on our behalf, for example, professional fundraising organisations who send out our fundraising or marketing materials or telephone agencies making fundraising calls on our behalf.

We carefully select our partners and will only share information with them if we are confident that they will protect it and comply with data protection law. We will have an agreement in place with them that assures this.

We will never share your details with other organisations to use for their own marketing purposes. 

We may also use other companies to provide services and process your personal information on our behalf including delivering postal mail, making telephone calls to our supporters, sending emails, sending SMS messages, processing credit card payments and analysing our supporter information (as set out in section 6) to help us communicate with you in the most appropriate way. 

 We may share your personal information with veterinary practices, Pet Insurers, and Microchip Companies to provide the products or services you’ve requested or require from us, but only to the extent strictly necessary. 

4.    Fundraising 

As a charity, we rely on donations and support from others to continue our important work. From time to time, we will contact existing donors with fundraising communications. This might occur after a predetermined period, relate to an appeal, or suggest ways you can raise funds for us. This could range from taking part in a sponsored event to buying a product or service whereby Stokenchurch Dog Rescue will receive some of the proceeds e.g. a pet insurance package. 

We will contact you by email where you have given your consent to us to do so.

We may contact you by phone if you have consented to us to do so or if we have called you in the past and you have not objected. If you are registered on the Telephone Preference Service (“TPS”) we will only call you if we have your consent to do so.

If you have provided us with your postal address we may write to you about our work unless you tell us that you would prefer not to hear from us in this way.

We will not use your information for communications if you have indicated that you do not wish to be contacted for such purposes. You can let us know at any time if you’d like to change your preferences or stop receiving communications altogether; please use the details in section 1 to let us know your preferences. 

If you receive our e-newsletters, you can use the unsubscribe link in any of the emails we send to stop receiving these.

If you ask us not to contact you, we will keep some basic information about you on our suppression list in order to avoid sending you unwanted materials in the future. 

5.   Targeting Our Communications And Researching Our Supporters

Our supporters make all of our vital work for dogs in need possible, especially as we receive no government funding. We have a duty to make sure that we are spending your donations wisely and that means doing some research and analysis to inform our decisions. We are continually striving to understand our supporters better and communicate in the most appropriate and relevant way we can. 

In order to work out who to contact, we, or a company working on our behalf, may analyse the personal data you provide to us in order to tailor our communications with you and make our appeals more relevant and cost-effective.  Specifically, we carry out the following activities:-

5.1  Donor Grouping

We may use freely-available information about a certain geographical area in order to better predict what residents of that area would be interested in e.g. residents of Oxford are unlikely to be interested in a new hospital which is opening up in Cornwall. We may also combine these demographic indicators with information you give us e.g. the types of appeals you have responded to in the past, in order to build a more accurate profile of the area. We may obtain likely indicators of interest or financial status based on your postcode rather than at an individual level. However, this information won’t be specific to you.

5.2  Anonymised Personal Data

We may aggregate and anonymise personal data so that it can no longer be linked to any particular person. This information can be used for a variety of purposes, such as targeting new donors or identifying trends or patterns within our existing supporter base.  This information helps inform our actions and improve our appeals, products/services and materials.

6.    Our Website And Cookies

We do not collect or process personal data about visitors to our website unless they choose to provide it, such as when signing up to our newsletter.  We may collect personal data about visitors to our website as this helps us optimise and improve it for everyone. This information might include your internet protocol address, the browser being used, the device (e.g. its operating system) and the connection type (e.g. the Internet service provider). However, none of this information is likely to directly identify you.

6.1  Cookies

Our website may use “cookies” to enhance your experience and enable certain functionality remembering that you have visited our website recently.). Web browsers place cookies on hard drives for record-keeping purposes and sometimes to track information (such as repeat visits). You can choose to set your web browser to refuse cookies or to alert you when cookies are being sent. However, if you refuse to allow cookies, this may interfere with your ability to use our website in the most efficient way.

6.2  Hyperlinks to other websites

Our website may contain hyperlinks to pages maintained by third parties. We are not responsible for the content or functionality of any of those external websites.  If an external website requests personal data from you, whatever information you provide will not be covered by this Policy. We suggest you read the privacy policy of any website before giving up any of your personal data.

7.   Keeping Your Information Safe

We employ a variety of physical and technical measures to keep your personal data safe and to prevent unauthorised access to, or use or disclosure of it. Electronic data and databases are stored on secure computer systems and we control who has access to them (using both physical and electronic means). Our staff and volunteers receive data protection training, and we have a set of detailed data protection procedures which they are required to follow when handling personal data. 

We cannot absolutely guarantee the security of the internet, external networks or your own device, accordingly any online communications (e.g. information provided by email or through our website) are at your own risk.

8.   Storage And Retention

We only store personal data as long as it is required for the purpose(s) we collected it for (or for a related compatible purpose, such as keeping a record of a donation). Legal requirements mean that we have to retain certain items of personal data for a given period of time e.g. gift aid declarations must be retained for seven years. To determine the appropriate retention period for personal data, we consider the amount, nature, and sensitivity of the personal data, the potential risk of harm from unauthorised use or disclosure of it, the purposes for which we process it and whether we can achieve those purposes through other means, together with the applicable legal requirements. We regularly review what data we have and delete that which is no longer necessary. In certain situations you have the right to request that your personal data be deleted (the ‘right to be forgotten’); please see section 11 for further details.

Details of retention periods for different aspects of your personal data are available in our retention policy and schedule which you can request by contacting us. 

9.   Children’s Personal Data 

We are committed to protecting the privacy of the young people who volunteer, fundraise, attend events organised by us and at schools or clubs or engage on our website. Where appropriate we will ask and obtain the consent of a parent or guardian. 

10.  Photography and filming

Stokenchurch Dog Rescue welcomes the general public to its site for a variety of activities such as but not limited to volunteering, adoptions, and fundraising events. We, or our authorised service providers, or any commercial partners we engage may photograph or film participants, volunteers and spectators attending or taking part in its work, events and activities and use such footage or photographs.

No personal details (including names) of any under 16-year-old participants will be used in any publicity materials without the written consent of their parent or legal guardian, but we may use images where children, young adults or person’s at risk are incidentally included (for example, images of family groupings at our dog shows). 

We do this in order to promote and publicise the charity, its work and/or events, typically for the purpose of fundraising including, but not limited to advertising, marketing material, social media, and other media that may be made available to the public. It also enables our service providers to publicise their involvement and/or association with the event.

Please be advised that at our events there could be photographers including those from organisations, such as the local press, who we are not responsible for. If you have any concerns or questions about photography at our events please speak to an employee of Stokenchurch Dog Rescue on the day.

11.  Your Rights

We want you to remain in control of your personal information. Part of this is making sure you understand your legal rights, which are as follows: 

(a)    where data is processed on the basis of consent, the right to withdraw that consent; 

(b)    the right to confirmation as to whether or not we have your personal data and, if we do, to obtain a copy of it (subject access);

(c)    the right to have inaccurate data rectified

(d)    the right to object to your data being used for profiling, or on the basis of our or a third party’s legitimate interests; 

(e)    the right to restrict how your personal information is used; and

(f)    the right to be forgotten, which allows you to have your data erased in certain circumstances. Please note this is not an absolute right and may not apply if we need to continue using it for a lawful reason.

(g)    the right to data portability, which allows individuals to obtain and reuse the personal data they have supplied to Stokenchurch Dog Rescue for their own purposes across different services in a safe and secure way.

If you would like further information on your rights or wish to exercise them, please write to the Data Protection Officer using the details given in section 1, with details of your request. Please keep in mind that there are exceptions to the rights above and, though we will always try to respond to your satisfaction, there may be situations where we are unable to do so (for example, because the personal data no longer exists or there is an exception which applies to your request). 

If you are not happy with our response, or you believe that your data protection or privacy rights have been infringed, you should contact the UK Information Commissioner's Office, which oversees data protection compliance in the UK. Details of how to do this can be found at www.ico.org.uk

12.  Updates To This Policy 

We may update this Policy at any time. When we do, we will post a notification on our website and revise the updated date at the bottom of this page. We encourage you to frequently check this page for any changes to stay informed about how we are helping to protect the personal information we hold.

Version 2.0 - 12 March 2021