Privacy Policy
The African Conservation Foundation resects your privacy. This privacy policy explains who we are, how we collect, share and use personal information, and how you can exercise your privacy rights. We recommend that you read this privacy policy in full to ensure you are fully informed.
If you have any questions or concerns about our use of your Personal Information, then please contact us using the contact details provided at the end of this policy statement.
1. About us
The African Conservation Foundation is a UK registered charity (Charity Number: 1120705) focused on protecting Africa’s endangered wildlife and their habitats. We develop and support projects, raise funds for these projects and build local capacity for long term sustainability of conservation initiatives.
2. Data protection principles
We will comply with GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) data protection law. This means that the personal information we hold about you will be:
- Used lawfully, fairly and in a transparent way.
- Collected only for valid purposes that we have clearly explained to you and not used in any way that is incompatible with those purposes.
- Relevant to the purposes we have told you about and limited only to those purposes
- Accurate and kept up to date.
- Kept only as long as necessary for the purposes we have told you about.
- Kept securely.
3. Information about you
Personal information we collect may include your name, title, email address, physical address, telephone number, interests when you provide this information, credit/debit card details (if you are making a purchase or donation), as well as information you provide in any communications between us. We may also ask for some additional, non-personal information for the purpose of a campaign or reservation.
4. How we collect information about you
We collect information from you in the following ways:
When you interact with us directly: This could be when you enquire about our activities, create an online account with us, make a donation, subscribe to our email newsletter, purchase something, apply for a job or volunteering opportunity or otherwise provide us with your personal information.
When you interact with us through third parties: When you make a donation through a third party such as JustGiving or other online donation platforms and provide your consent for your personal information to be shared with us.
When you visit our website: Our website collects non-personal information which might include which pages are visited most often and which projects or information is of most interest to you. We may also track which pages are visited when you click on links in email newsletters. We use “cookies” to help our website run effectively. Please see the section about cookies.
5. Why we collect information about you
Information you have provided whilst making a donation, registering on our website, placing an order on our website, sending an enquiry or reservation, signing up for our newsletter or any other ways you interact with us, will be used:
- When you have freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous consent to the processing of your personal information for one or more specific purposes.
- To process your donations or other payments, to claim Gift Aid on your donations and verify any financial transactions.
- To provide the services or goods that you have requested.
- To update you with important administrative messages about your donation, an event or services or goods you have requested.
- When you have subscribed to our mailing list to keep informed about our work.
- We may also use personal information to carry out due diligence so that we are fundraising in accordance within the law and our internal policies and procedures.
- When we need to comply with a legal obligation and are asked by legitimate authorities to share this information.
6. Newsletters and emails
When you provide us with an email address, and we have your explicit consent to do so, we may send you information from time to time about news, events and projects that are in need of funding. These emails will always be accompanied by a link allowing you to unsubscribe at any time. Your email address will be stored on our secure database in the UK, and the emails will be sent using a third-party application called MailChimp which processes and stores your email address securely in the US. MailChimp will also provide us with details about which emails you have opened and when, and what links within an email you may have opened. We will only use this information to ensure that what we send is relevant, timely and of interest to you. MailChimp are certified with the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield Framework and details of their privacy policy can be found on their website.
7. How we share your information
The personal information we collect about you will mainly be used by our staff. We are committed to protecting your personal data and therefore it will never be disclosed to external organisations other than those acting as agents and data processors carrying out work on our behalf. We require third parties to respect the security of your data and to treat it in accordance with the law. We may transfer your personal information outside the EU. Information that we collect may be stored and processed in and transferred between any of the countries in which we operate in order to enable us to use the information in accordance with this policy. If we do, you can expect a similar degree of protection in respect of your personal information. We will never trade or sell data or lists to other parties.
8. Your rights to access, update, correct or delete your information
Under the General Data Protection Regulation 2016/679 you have the right to:
- Request access to your personal information (commonly known as a “data subject access request”). This enables you to receive a copy of the personal information we hold about you and to check that we are lawfully processing it.
- Request correction of the personal information that we hold about you. This enables you to have any incomplete or inaccurate information we hold about you corrected.
- Request erasure of your personal information. This enables you to ask us to delete or remove personal information where there is no good reason for us continuing to process it. You also have the right to ask us to delete or remove your personal information where you have exercised your right to object to processing (see below).
- Object to processing of your personal information where we are relying on a legitimate interest (or those of a third party) and there is something about your particular situation which makes you want to object to processing on this ground. You also have the right to object where we are processing your personal information for direct marketing purposes.
- Request the restriction of processing of your personal information. This enables you to ask us to suspend the processing of personal information about you, for example if you want us to establish its accuracy or the reason for processing it.
- Request the transfer of your personal information to another party.
We want to make sure that your personal information is accurate and up to date. If your information changes or you think the information we have is incorrect, please change your details by logging in to our website or let us know so that we can make the necessary amendments to our records.
If you do not want to receive any further information about our activities and would like us to remove your name from our mailing list, please contact us to let us know.
9. Legal basis for processing data
We process personal information as a data controller as described in this section, where such processing is in our legitimate interests and not overridden by your data protection interests or fundamental rights and freedoms. Our legitimate interests typically include: improving, maintaining, providing, and enhancing our website, projects, products and services; ensuring the security of the Services and our Website; and for our marketing activities.
10. Cookies
Like many websites, we use cookies, or tiny pieces of information stored on your computer, to verify who you are. There are cookies for logged in users and for commenters. We do not actively place or monitor any other cookies via our website. We are using Google Analytics to measure website data which enables us to better understand website usage and improve the experience for our visitors. Through anonymisation we remove data that could lead to an individual being identified.
11. Data retention
We will only keep your data for as long as is necessary, which may be to fulfil statutory obligations (for example, the collection of Gift Aid). We will delete your information as soon as there is no longer any legitimate reason to retain it.
12. How we keep your data safe
We have put in place appropriate security measures to prevent your personal information from being accidentally lost, used or accessed in an unauthorised way, altered or disclosed. In addition, we limit access to your personal information to those employees, agents or other third parties who need this information. They will only process your personal information on our instructions and they are subject to a duty of confidentiality. We have put in place procedures to deal with any suspected data security breach and will notify you and any applicable regulator of a suspected breach where we are legally required to do so.
Changes to this privacy notice
We reserve the right to update this privacy notice at any time, and we will provide you with a new privacy notice when we make any substantial updates. We may also notify you in other ways from time to time about the processing of your personal information.
Contact us
If you have any queries about this policy or any complaints with regard to the administration of the policy, please contact us through info@africanconservation.org.