At WaterAid we take your privacy very seriously and are committed to protecting your personal information. Please read this policy, along with our website terms and conditions carefully to understand how we collect, use and store your personal information.
WaterAid, a UK charity, aims to transform lives by improving access to clear water, decent toilets and good hygiene available in the world’s poorest communities.
WaterAid (registered company number 1787329 and registered charity numbers 288701 (England and Wales) and SC039479 (Scotland)) also operates a wholly owned trading subsidiary, WaterAid Trading Limited (registered company number 2362892).
WaterAid is the ‘controller’ of your personal information and is responsible for it. This privacy policy explains how we, WaterAid, and WaterAid Trading may collect and use the information you give us.
WaterAid International
WaterAid operates globally, and is established in a number of countries across the world. It may be the case that other WaterAid countries may be best placed to manage your relationship and provide you with any necessary support. More information about the WaterAid federation and each Member can be found on our website.
At the date of publication of this privacy policy, this includes:
We may share your personal information with the “WaterAid Group”, only in accordance with data privacy law, and where we have put in place appropriate safeguards. We only transfer personal information using safe and secure methods to limit the risk it is compromised.
Contact details
Our Data Protection Officers are Elizabeth Shippen and Jessica Corney.
If you have any questions regarding our Privacy Policy, please write to:
The Data Protection Officer
WaterAid
47-49 Durham Street
London SE11 5JD
Email: dataprotection@wateraid.org
Or call our Supporter Care team: 0044 207 793 4594
This policy includes:
We collect personal information in the following ways:
When you provide it directly
For example, when you:
When you provide it indirectly
For example, when it is shared with us by third parties such as professional fundraisers, partners, or subcontractors acting on our behalf, or through fundraising sites such as JustGiving or Virgin Money. These organisations will have their own privacy policies, and/or statements so please do ensure you check when providing your personal information to them.
When you have given other organisations permission to share it
You may have provided your details to another organisation that works with WaterAid. For example, in order to sign up to a third party event, or if you purchased a product via Shopify on Shop for Life. When working with other organisations, we work to ensure it’s completely clear to you that your information will be shared with WaterAid. The information we get from these third parties depends on your settings and the permissions and choices you have provided, so you should regularly check what you have agreed that these third party organisations may share with us or with others.
Via social media
Depending on your settings and the relevant policies and terms of service, when using social media and messaging services like Facebook and Twitter, you might give us permission to access information about you from those accounts or services.
When we collect information when you are using our website
Upon visiting our website, information about your visit is recorded and stored. See the section below on the use of cookies for more details.
When your information is available from public sources
We may collect personal information about you from the public domain, such as from open social networks, company websites, political and property registers and news archives. We may use third party agencies to collect this information. Please see the section below on “What categories of personal information do we collect?” for more details.
To administer legacies
In the course of administering legacies gifted to WaterAid we may obtain the personal information of, for example, other beneficiaries to the will. We also work with third party probate specialists who provide us with this information, and sometimes obtain it from other charities who are named in the will.
The types of personal information we collect depends on how we intend to use it.
We collect, store and use the following kinds of personal information:
Where it is appropriate, we may ask for your reason for giving and your specific interests relating to WaterAid’s work. This is because we want to ensure our communications with you are relevant and appropriate.
To achieve this, we carry out targeted fundraising activity to ensure we provide the best experience for our supporters and the most efficient and effective use of our charitable resources. In doing so, we may supplement information you provide us with information we collect from third party sources. This is to help us better understand your background and ensure any requests for additional support are tailored to you and how you might support us. This also helps us reduce irrelevant or inappropriate communications to our supporters, so that we can operate as cost effectively as possible. This information may include:
Sensitive personal information
Data protection law identifies certain categories of personal information as sensitive and therefore requiring more protection. For example, information about health or ethnicity. Where appropriate we may also collect/use this information, but normally only where we have your explicit consent or data protection law allows it, such as to protect the life of an individual participating in a fundraising event. We only aim to collect this type of information when we feel it is necessary in relation to your relationship with us.
We will use your personal information in a number of ways depending on the purposes for which it has been collected, including for the following purposes:
We always want you to get the most out of our website, so if you do experience any issues with our online forms we may follow up with you to find out how our team can best support you with any problems experienced.
Administrative communications
We will communicate with you using the contact details you have provided for essential administrative purposes, such as to administer a donation or provide you with information regarding a fundraising event you have asked to take part in.
Marketing communications
We love to keep our supporters up to date with our fundraising, marketing and campaign activity
If you have given us your consent to do so, we will contact you for marketing purposes by email, SMS message and telephone calls. We may also send you communications by post, on the basis it is in our legitimate interests to do so, unless you ask us not to.
We currently send the following marketing materials:
(a) Updates about our work – including newsletters, magazines and other publications.
(b) Campaigns – information about our campaigning activities and their progress.
(c) Appeals and fundraising activities – including requests for donations, information about how you can leave us a gift in your will, and how you can take part in fundraising events or fundraise on our behalf, as well as the impact all of this has on our work.
(d) Events – including details of our challenge events and other sponsored activities. If you sign up to take part in an event we will also send you administrative communications about how you can take part.
(e) Shop products – including information about products offered by our online shop.
(f) Volunteering – information about how you can get involved with volunteering for WaterAid.
You are in control of how we use your personal information for marketing and fundraising purposes, and can update your preferences at any time. If you would like to contact us about your marketing preferences, please write to WaterAid, 47-49 Durham Street, London SE11 5JD, email supportercare@wateraid.org or call us on 0207 793 4594 – our Supporter Care Team will be happy to answer any queries you may have. If you do ask us to stop sending marketing communications, please note that we will continue to send you administrative communications as needed.
If you ask us to stop sending you marketing materials, we will keep a record of your contact details and appropriate information to enable us to comply with your request not to be contacted by us.
We may analyse your personal information to create a profile about you, your interests and preferences. In doing this, we may combine information that you have given us with other information about you when it is available (for example, from public records or social media). This may include any of the information listed above (for example, an estimate of your age). This provides background information about our supporters and helps us to tailor appropriate communications to them as well as helping us to improve the quality of our supporters’ experience with us. We may use third party suppliers to undertake these activities on our behalf and share your data with them only to the extent required (usually full name and post code). Please rest assured that our suppliers will not share this information with any other organisation and it will only be used for the purposes set out above. Additionally, we may use and disclose information in aggregate (so that no individuals are identified) for marketing and strategic development purposes.
You can opt out of your data being used in this way by calling our Supporter Care Team on 0207 793 4594 or by emailing supportercare@wateraid.org.
We participate in Facebook’s ‘Custom Audience’ program which enables us to display ads to our existing supporters when they visit Facebook. We provide your email address, mobile number and address, to Facebook so they can determine whether you are a registered account holder with them. Our adverts may then appear when you access Facebook. Your data is sent in an encrypted format that is deleted by Facebook if it does not match with a Facebook account.
For more information please see Facebook's information about Custom Audiences and Facebook’s Data Policy.
While we do not actively collect information from children (under-18s), we appreciate that our supporters are of all ages. Where appropriate, we will always ask for consent from a parent or guardian to collect information about children. All WaterAid events will have clear rules on whether or not children can take part and the collection of data will be managed in accordance with each individual event, with appropriate safeguards in place.
'Cookies' are small pieces of information stored on your computer or mobile device when you visit our website, to collect information and identify you. We provide separate information about our use of cookies here.
We place great importance on the security of your personal information and always take appropriate precautions to protect it.
We ensure that there are security measures in place to protect your personal data. For example, we use encryption technology on our websites and carry out regular security reviews on our network.
We only allow authorised personnel to have access to your information i.e. WaterAid staff, volunteers or contractors and ensure that they are appropriately trained.
Payment details (such as credit or debit cards) we receive through our website are passed securely to our payment processing providers who meet the required Payment Card Industry (PCI) Security Standards. We do not store your card details, when donations are made in this way.
Despite all of our precautions no data transmission over the internet can be guaranteed to be 100% secure.
Sometimes, we use external organisations to process personal data on our behalf – for example suppliers and subcontractors, payment providers, mailing houses, legacy administrators and external fundraising entities and platforms. Before working with these companies we perform rigorous checks to ensure they provide appropriate safeguards in respect of your personal data and treat it in accordance with the law. We always ensure we have a contract in place with these third party suppliers, and those contracts include robust data protection requirements.
Financial or technical considerations may occasionally lead us to use the services of a supplier based outside the European Economic Area (EEA), which in turn might lead to your personal information being transferred, processed and stored outside of the EEA. Where necessary, we take steps to provide suitable safeguards to protect your personal information, so that these transfers are compliant with data protection laws. If you would like to receive further information about this, please contact our Data Protection Officer.
We may share your personal information with our trading subsidiary, or with other organisations in the WaterAid Group (see “Who we are” above) so they can contact you where this is legitimate reason and/or is appropriate.
We might need to share your personal information with others if we are under a duty to do so or to comply with a legal obligation, or in order to protect the rights, property or safety of WaterAid, our employees, volunteers, supporters or others. This includes for example sharing details with the police or for regulatory reasons.
Where possible, we try to keep your records up to date; for example, using the Post Office’s National Change of Address database. However, we really appreciate it if you let us know if your contact details change.
For some information we hold, there are legal requirements which determine how long we must keep it. For example, HMRC require us to retain details of Gift Aid for at least six years after the year in which the last donation was made.
Generally, we hold your personal information on our systems for as long as is necessary for the relevant activity, for example, in general we will only keep your contact information for as long as our interactions with you continue and for six years thereafter.
After such a period, within our database, we anonymise records so we can reference behavioural patterns in our data analytics, but the information is no longer personal to you.
Legacy income is vital to sustaining WaterAid’s work. We may keep some of your personal information for at least 13 years after we receive the full gift or longer in some circumstances, so that we can administer legacy gifts and communicate effectively with the families of people leaving us legacies. This also enables us to identify and analyse the source of legacy income we receive.
Data privacy law requires us to have one or more lawful grounds to process your personal information. The following grounds are relevant to our use of your information:
WaterAid’s legitimate interests are ultimately in pursuit of our charitable objectives, including:
You retain ultimate control of how we use your personal information.
You can always request details and copies of the information we hold about you.
Data privacy law gives you a number of additional rights. These include:
If you want to enforce any of these rights in respect to your personal information, please contact: The Data Protection Officer, WaterAid, 47-49 Durham Street, London SE11 5JD or email dataprotection@wateraid.org.
Please be aware that the above descriptions are necessarily brief and non-legal. You may only exercise some of these rights in limited circumstances and for more information on these rights please read the relevant guidance issued by the ICO, the regulatory body in the UK for data privacy.
If you would like to make a complaint about how we process your personal data, please contact our Data Protection Officer at dataprotection@wateraid.org.
You are entitled to make a complaint to the Information Commissioner’s Office at any time. However, we are grateful for the opportunity to address your concerns before you feel this step is necessary.
Please note that you can also register with the following services to stop receiving unsolicited marketing communications from a selected charity or charities:
This policy may change from time to time. If we make any significant changes to this policy, we will publicise these changes clearly on our website or contact you directly with more information.
This Privacy Policy was last updated on 3rd May 2018.
Please revisit this policy each time you consider giving your personal information to WaterAid.