Context
St David’s Children Society is a Voluntary Adoption and Fostering Agency. We are committed to protecting your personal date and respecting your wishes in keeping your information safe. We aim to be clear about when we collect your date and not do anything with it that you would not reasonably expect. This notice is to help you understand what personal date we collect, how we use it and how we store it.
St David’s Children Society is a Registered Charity (Registration Number 509163) and a company limited by Guarantee (Registered Cardiff 1546688).
- St David’s Adoption Service is the brand name of the St David’s Children Society’s adoption service.
- St David’s Fostering Service is the brand name of the St David’s Children Society’s foster service.
- The Association for Fostering and Adoption (AFA) Cymru is the brand name of the St David’s Children Society’s advice, training, and consultancy service.
Any personal date collected will be used and held in accordance with requirements as directed by the Data Protection Act 2018 and data protection requirements under UK GDPR and any additional of successor legislation or regulation.
Under the Data Protection Act 2018 and the General Data Protection Regulation 2018 St David’s Children Society is the ‘data controller’ and is responsible for ensuring personal data held about you is used for the purposes set out in this notice.
Why do we collect your information?
We collect personal information from you through any of our services in order to:
- Process your donations or other payments, to claim gift aid on your donations and verify financial transactions.
- Register your consent for contact to provide you with services, goods or other information/ material requested.
- Communicate with you about fundraising activities.
- To support your fundraising activities.
- Respond to an enquiry, question or complaint.
- Register your attendance or support of an event.
- Keep a record of your relationship with us.
- Continually manage your communication preferences.
- Comply with our legal obligations, policies and procedures.
- Meet financial auditing requirements.
- Understand how we can improve our services, products or information.
We use the data you provide to build a positive and personal relationship with you, providing you with the information you want when you want it, and involving you in our work and the future development of our services in a way that is relevant to you, specifically in relation to fundraising.
What information do we collect?
The type of information we collect and how we use it varies depending on why you are providing it. It may include:
- Title and name
- Gender
- Date of birth.
- Postal address,
- Email address.
- Telephone number/mobile number,
- Financial information you give us when making a payment or donation, including information about your Gift Aid status, including credit/debit care details.
- Information given when completing a consent forms.
- Information given when filling out an online form.
- Next of Kin contact details if participating in a challenge.
- Details needed to provide materials such as t-shirt size.
- Name and address of employer.
- Records of correspondence with us.
- Records of donation history.
- Non-identifying information about your visit to our website, including technical information such as your IP address
- Any other information provided by yourself that is relevant to your relationship with us, for instance your motivations for supporting our work.
This may include sensitive data that you have provided to us, however, we will only keep this data if it is relevant. We do not usually collect special categories of data about our supporters, or for marketing purposes, unless there is a clear reason for doing so (i.e. we may ask about your health when you book onto an event to make sure we provide appropriate support and facilities).
How do we collect information?
We collect information about you when you sign up as a fundraising champion, make a donation or payment, sign up for a challenge, fundraising event, request to be included on our fundraising information sharing mailing list or otherwise provide us with your personal information.
This could be in person, via email, via our website, via Just Giving (or equivalent websites) and be completing our consent forms. We also collect information when you voluntarily complete surveys and provide feedback. Website usage is also collected with your consent via cookies.
Is St David’s Adoption Service allowed to collect this information?
When we collect and use your personal information, we make sure we adhere to at least one of the legal grounds available to us under Data Protection Law.
- Consent – We obtain your consent to collect and use your personal information for a previously notified purpose, such as to send you email, or provide you with the information or services you have requested. We rely on consent as the legal basis to communicate with our supporters and clients by email and/or text.
- Legal obligation – In certain circumstances we may process or disclose your information because we are legally obliged to do so – for instance where we are legally required to hold your transaction details for Gift Aid or tax purposes.
- Legitimate interest – We believe that the people who support our work have an interest in receiving occasional updates from us, which is why we rely on the legitimate interest legal basis to send them direct marketing communications. We also rely on the legitimate interest legal basis to conduct research to better understand and target our supporters and those interested in our services, to monitor who we deal with and conduct due diligence checks to mitigate against potential risks to our agency and service users, as well as to maintain and administer our fundraising database and systems.
We have a legitimate organisational interest to doing this which we balance against your individual rights, making sure we only use your personal information in a way and for a purpose that you would reasonably expect and that does not intrude on your privacy or previously expressed preferences.
How is the data used and who will see it?
You information is held within the secure St David’s system Microsoft Office 365 and remains confidential. We aim to ensure that there are appropriate controls in place to protect your personal information. We ensure our network and websites are protected and regularly monitored. St David’s Children Society is certified under the Cyber Essentials scheme.
We use the details you have given to us, in combination with the above legal grounds and any marketing preferences, to send you information about our vital work, the services we offer that are relevant to you and any opportunities relevant to you.
We will only ever contact you about our work and how you can support St David’s by email, post or phone, in line with your preferences. If you have not provided consent, we may send you information about our work and how you can support us by email under legitimate interests.
Your wishes are important to us
We promise that we will always communicate with you according to your wishes. It’s always your choice as to whether you receive information about how we raise funds and the ways you can get involved.
You can change how we use the information you have provided to us at any time by letting us know. If you do not want to hear from us that is also fine.
Please contact our Business Development Manager on 02920 667007 or email fundraisingsupport@stdavidscs.org to change or amend your communication preferences, or ask to not contact you anymore.
Who do we share your information with?
We do not sell or share your personal details to third parties for either fundraising or marketing purposes. We do however use third party suppliers to perform some services on our behalf, e.g., process card payments, manage online fundraising pages, take event bookings etc. In these circumstances we do not give these organisations any rights to use your information except to provide services to us in accordance with our instructions and any agreements we have in place. We take care to ensure that our third party suppliers have appropriate policies and procedures in place to safely manage your data whilst working on our behalf.
Links on our website
Our websites may contain links to third party websites. These third party websites will have their own privacy policies so, if you follow a link to any of these websites, please make yourself aware of their privacy policies before submitting any of your personal information as we do not accept any responsibility or liability for the privacy policies or data handling processes of others.
Transmitting information over the internet
Despite all of our precautions to protect our website and network no data transmission over the internet can be guaranteed to be 100% secure. So, whilst we strive to protect your personal information, we cannot guarantee the security of any of the information you disclose to us online and wish to draw your attention that you do so at your own risk.
How long do we keep your information?
We store your information for only as long as is necessary and/or legally required for the relevant activity. Your consent will remain valid for 7 years from the date you provided it. Your consent and communication preferences will be recorded on our systems, and you will receive written and/or electronic communications in accordance with your wishes. You can change or withdraw your consent at any time.
We keep information such as your name, address and donation history for 7 years from your last donation in order to fulfil our tax and auditing obligations.
We will not use your details for fundraising or marketing purposes if you have indicated that you do not wish to receive this communication at the point of donation or should you later withdraw your consent. However, we will keep information such as your name, address and donation history in our database for financial auditing purposes and to ensure that we don’t mail you in the future if you have asked to no longer be contacted for 7 years before your data is destroyed.
Keeping your data secure
The information you provide is subject to rigorous security measures and procedures to make sure it can’t be seen. We have put in place appropriate physical and electronic measures (including Cyber Essentials certification), security policies and managerial procedures to safeguard and secure personal data we store from unauthorised access, improper use, alteration, unlawful or accidental destruction or accidental loss.
Only authorised personnel will have access to your personal information. All personnel who have access to your personal data are contractually obliged to respect the confidentiality of your personal data.
Your rights to your personal information
Under the Data Protection Act 1998 you have a right to request a copy of the personal information we hold about you and to have any inaccuracies corrected. You also have a right to request us to erase your personal information, ask us to limit our processing of your information, or object to the processing of your information and to submit a complaint.
Should you wish to exercise these rights we ask you to prove your identity with two pieces of approved identification. Please address requests to CEO, St David’s Children Society, 28 Park Place, Cardiff, CF10 3BA and we will respond within 40 days of receipt of your written request and confirmed ID. Please provide as much information as possible about the nature of your contact with us to help us locate your records.
What if I am unhappy?
You can find out more about your personal data rights by going to the Information
Commissioner’s Office (ICO) website at https://ico.org.uk/your-data-matters/.
For further independent advice about data protection, and your personal data rights, you can contact:
Information Commissioner’s Office – Wales
2nd Floor, Churchill House
Churchill Way
Cardiff
CF10 2HH
Tel: 02920 678400
Fax: 02920 678399
E-mail: Wales@ico.gov.uk
Web: www.ico.org.uk
How to change the way we contact you
You can change how we use the information you have provided to us at any time by letting us know. If you do not want to hear from us that is also fine. Please call 02920 667007 or email fundraisingsupport@stdavidscs.org to change or amend your communication preferences, or ask us to not contact you anymore.
Changes to this policy
This policy was last updated in April 2024. We may update the terms of this policy at any time, so please do check it from time to time. We will notify you about significant changes in the way we treat personal information by sending a notice to the primary email address you have provided to us or by placing a prominent notice on our website.
