PRIVACY AND COOKIE NOTICE

Your privacy is important to us

This notice explains how we collect, manage, use and protect your personal information and sets out our commitment to you. It covers our supporters, people who apply to work or volunteer with us, and visitors to our websites, including how we use cookies and similar technologies. It also provides simple ways for you to get in touch should you have any questions or would like to change anything related to how we use your personal information.  All of our decisions around data are guided by our commitment to respecting and protecting your privacy.

Contents

WHO WE ARE

Our commitment to you

Your privacy is important to us.

As a charity we rely on our supporters, staff and many people who become involved with us to be able to deliver our vision of a world in which children no longer suffer orphanages.

In meeting our commitment to you we will:

  • observe fully the conditions regarding the fair collection and use of personal data;
  • meet its obligations to specify the purposes for which personal data is collected and used;
  • collect and process appropriate personal data to the extent that it is needed to fulfil operational or legal requirements;
  • ensure the quality of the personal data we collect, store and use;
  • apply strict checks to determine the length of time personal data is held and used;
  • ensure that the rights of individuals about whom the personal data is held can be fully exercised under the appropriate legislation;
  • take the appropriate technical and organisational security measures to safeguard personal data;
  • ensure that personal data is not transferred abroad without suitable safeguards.

As data controllers we meet the legislative requirements as set out under the Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA); the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR); the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR); and the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025. 

Our details

Hope and Homes for Children is a charitable company limited by guarantee.

Company number: 04193179

Charity number: 1089490

Contacting us

You can contact us at any time to discuss this notice; update the information we hold about you; request or opt out of receiving marketing and fundraising communications from us; or change the way we process your information by:

  • Emailing us at: [email protected]
  • Writing to us at: Freepost RUGC-KSGA-ZZZS, Hope and Homes for Children, Unit 6, Wilton Village, King Street, Wilton, SALISBURY, SP2 0RS
  • Calling us on +44 (0)1722 790111

WHAT INFORMATION WE COLLECT ABOUT YOU

Personal information is collected directly from you when you interact with Hope and Homes for Children, for example, when you:

  • make a donation or purchase one of our virtual gifts or Christmas cards
  • volunteer with us or participate in an event
  • send an email or make an enquiry using any channel, including via social networks, post and phone
  • visit our websites
  • apply for a role with us
  • sign up to a campaign or for our email newsletter.

Information may be collected in person, over the phone, through our websites, social media, on forms completed at an event or from something you’ve posted to us.

The information we hold will typically include some of, or all of, your name, postal and email addresses, your phone number(s), and may include information like your date of birth and your bank account details if required, to enable you to support us financially for example through a regular direct debit.

We may also ask you to provide specific information about your interests or lifestyle and where appropriate. For example if you take part in a challenge event, we may collect details about your health. We will only collect such health information where we have your explicit consent, or an exception applies under data protection laws.

If you attend one of our events, we may take photographs for public use such as in our publications or on social media. We will always provide clear notice before and during the event that we may be taking photographs, and we will give clear instructions as to how you can opt out of your picture being used.

When you visit our websites, we also collect information so that our website works properly, and so that we can understand and improve how our website is used. This includes cookies and similar technologies and is explained in the ‘Our websites and cookies’ section below.

We may also collect or receive information about you from other sources (including public sources). This is explained in the ‘How we use your information’ section below.

Sometimes, we may also link your personal record to family members, friends, colleagues or other acquaintances that we know are connected to you. We do this when you or the other party have indicated there is a connection, as this helps us when we correspond with you, or them, for example, if we hold an event and want to ensure we are inviting people who would enjoy meeting with each other. It also helps us to understand the effectiveness of our network-based fundraising approach.

HOW WE USE YOUR INFORMATION

If you are a supporter or friend of our charity

If you are a supporter, subscriber or friend of our charity who receives marketing and fundraising materials or makes donations, we may use your information for administration purposes and to ensure the materials we send you are appropriate.

Processing your donation or purchase

When you make a donation or other payment to Hope and Homes for Children, we will use your payment and contact details, payment amount, date and time of payment to process that payment and take any follow-up action needed, for example, sending a confirmation of your gift to you.

If you choose to include Gift Aid with a donation to us, then we will always ask for your address and UK taxpayer status as this information is required by law. You can read more about how Gift Aid works here: https://www.gov.uk/donating-to-charity/gift-aid.

This information is needed for us to fulfil our obligations under tax and charity law. Information associated with Gift Aid declarations must be retained by us for a minimum of six years after the end of the year or accounting period that includes your last donation but may be retained longer. It will be shared with HMRC for tax regulation purposes and may also be shared with the Fundraising Regulator and the Charity Commission in the event of an enquiry or investigation.

Like many organisations, we use a host of carefully vetted and selected third party services to facilitate the processing of donations and purchases. These include Raisley, Ticket Tailor, JustGiving and others. This means that your information may be passed to us by these processors. Please check the privacy policy of any third-party platform, such as JustGiving, for confirmation of how they manage your data.

Responding to enquiries

If you contact us with a question, comment, compliment or complaint then we will keep a record of this correspondence and any associated documents so that we have the information available in the event of a follow-up, dispute or investigation.

Notifying you of changes to policies

If we make significant changes to policies which may affect you, we will use your contact details to inform you of the changes.

Requesting information if you are attending our events

If you attend an event, we may process and share your contact information and information required to safely host you at the event. Where this includes information about dietary, health conditions or access requirements we also need your explicit consent as this type of information is classed as special category data. Where we must disclose this data to event partners to ensure safe and inclusive events, we will ensure that they are in compliance with applicable data privacy laws and contractual obligations.

Sharing marketing and fundraising materials with you

If you have supported us or shown an interest in our work, we may send you updates on our activities and their impact, news, events and fundraising appeals, and invite you to get involved in other ways, such as taking part in events, fundraising or spreading the word.

By email or text: we will contact you only if you have given us your consent or, where you gave us your details directly from 5th February 2026 and were offered the chance to opt out at the time, under the charitable purposes soft opt-in.

By post: we may write to you on the basis of our legitimate interests unless you have asked us not to.

By phone: we may call you unless you have asked us not to. If you are registered with the Telephone Preference Service, we won’t call you unless you have specifically told us we can.

Every message we send will give you a simple way to opt out. You can change how we contact you, or stop it altogether, at any time by using the details in the ‘Contacting us’ section, the reply area on our postal communications, or the unsubscribe link in our emails.

Targeting our communications and researching our supporters

It is important to us that we use your donations wisely in order to have the greatest impact for children and families. In order to do so, we use research and analysis to inform the decisions we make around who we fundraise from and how. We seek to ensure our fundraising and marketing efforts are as efficient and effective as possible at inspiring support and engaging existing and new supporters about our work. In order to identify who to contact, what to say and when to get in touch, we carry out the following activities:

Segmenting our communications. We may analyse information such as how often supporters donate, by how much, and in what way and why, in order to decide how often or what type of information and fundraising materials we share with those supporters. We may also analyse the postcodes of our supporters to help us identify groups of supporters to invite to local events, or to decide on new fundraising activities in certain geographical areas. This type of analysis helps us to keep our fundraising effective but most importantly is designed to ensure we communicate with the right people, in the right way, always with the intention of improving the experience of supporting Hope and Homes for Children.

Analysing how emails are opened and read. Our email marketing service provider may track your engagement with emails using pixels and other tracking technologies. Our use of these technologies is explained below. 

Finding other people like you who might like to hear from us. We may use your data to help find more people like you, so that we can grow our supporter base through our online and offline channels. We use third-party services to do this which you are likely to be familiar with, including Google and Meta.

Prospect research and wealth screening. We may gather information about you from publicly available sources – for example, Companies House, the Electoral Register, land records, the Charity Commission of England and Wales, the Scottish Charity Regulator, and the media – to help us to understand more about you as an individual and your ability and interest to support our work, including financially. Through our research, we aim to collect information about your philanthropic interests, for example, trusteeships or board memberships. We take this approach in order to ensure that we develop relationships appropriately and that you always receive the most appropriate communications. This also helps ensure that our fundraising activity is as effective as it can be. In some cases, for example in the case of very large donations, this information is also helpful for due diligence purposes.

The information used could include your preferences, interests, and capacity to give financially in order to establish whether any of our supporters has the potential to give for the first time or to give more. This may be by desk research, profiling and screening techniques to analyse your personal information so we can build a profile to contact you with relevant information, to be prepared when we meet you, or to help us find other people like you who might like to show their support. In certain instances, we may add publicly available information to our analysis – for example addresses, information from government registers, newspaper and web articles, social media posts, or typical earnings in an industry. This helps to give us a fuller picture of who supports Hope and Homes for Children and whether it is appropriate to make an approach for increased giving, or to work out whether it would be appropriate to ask someone to consider leaving us a legacy. This helps us to make appropriate and relevant approaches and target our resources more effectively. We may also use geo-demographic information and measures of affluence to tailor asks accordingly.

We may on occasion use trusted third-party partners (some examples are: Prospecting for Gold, Wealth-X or Experian Mosaic) to provide us with the aforementioned profiling information. We would have appropriate data protection agreements in place and we would only provide them with the elements of data we hold about you to make this task possible.’

You can let us know if you would rather we did not undertake such analysis or wealth screening by emailing us at [email protected].

We use profiling, as described in this section, to help us decide what to send you and whether to approach you. We do not make decisions about you based solely on automated processing that have legal or similarly significant effects on you. You have the right to object at any time to profiling for direct marketing purposes, and if you do, we will stop.

Keeping your records up to date. We may also update the records we hold using publicly available sources, for example to correct your address, to add your age, or to check death registers so that we don’t contact people who have died. We do this to keep our records accurate and our communications relevant.

Retaining your information

We will retain your personal information for no longer than we believe is necessary for the purposes for which it is processed (in accordance with our internal policies including our data retention policy). If you ask us not to contact you, we will keep some basic information about you on a suppression list in order to avoid sending you unwanted materials in the future.

Using your information to enforce and comply with the law

As with all charities, we ensure that our activities comply with the law. This means that we may need to share or use your personal information if we are required to do so by law, for example, in response to a warrant or court order, and we may use information from other sources for the purposes of fraud prevention, for example, to comply with money laundering regulations, or to protect people’s rights, property or safety.

If certain levels of donation are made, the Fundraising Regulator’s Code of Fundraising Practice requires us, and all charities in the UK, to perform certain checks on the donation. More details can be found at https://www.fundraisingregulator.org.uk/.

If you are applying for a paid or volunteer role

Your CV, covering letter, supporting information and any other documents submitted as part of your application for any position with Hope and Homes for Children will be used during the recruitment process to short-list suitable candidates who will be invited to proceed to interview stage, and to select the final candidate that the role will be offered to. These documents will also be used to assess suitability for volunteer positions.

We sometimes use third-party job application platforms and recruitment agencies to publish and receive applications for roles at Hope and Homes for Children. When you apply through these platforms and organisations, our privacy notice will be made available to you. We only work alongside other organisations in this way if we are satisfied that they will keep your information safely and use it only in the same legal ways that we would.

During the recruitment process, we may perform some checks on your identity, your right to work in the UK, and your eligibility to work with vulnerable people and children. We will also take up employment references.

If your application is successful, this information will then form part of your personnel file.

We delete the personal information of unsuccessful applications 12 months after the application process ends in case there are follow-up queries about the process, unless a candidate requests that we keep their details for longer. Statistical information like ethnicity, sexuality and disability is kept to ensure that our recruitment processes are inclusive and not discriminatory, but this is held separately from applications and anonymised for reporting.

If we are required by law to share your information (for example, in response to a warrant or court order), we will do so.

If you visit our websites

How we use information collected when you visit our websites, including through cookies, is set out in the next section.

OUR WEBSITES AND COOKIES

We take your privacy seriously, whether you’re visiting our websites or contacting us in other ways. We know that sharing your information with us takes great trust, so we want you to be confident it is being looked after.

Which websites this covers

This section applies to hopeandhomes.org and our related sites, including donate.hopeandhomes.org and careers.hopeandhomes.org.

Information we collect when you visit

When using our websites you don’t have to give any personal data to us – doing that is voluntary, for example when you make a donation, sign up for an event or subscribe to our newsletter.

We log the IP address of the computer you are using in order to protect our servers against abuse and malicious activity. The logs are deleted every 30 days.

With your consent, we also collect information to measure the performance of the websites, the volume of traffic that the sites receive, how site users move around the sites and what sort of users the sites attract. We analyse trends and patterns in this data so that we can improve your website experience. It helps us to identify problems with the website, ensure we are giving users the information they need, and monitor the number of people we are reaching with our work. We may share information about general user trends with our partners, but this does not identify you.

What cookies and similar technologies are

A cookie is a small piece of data which is stored on your device (for example, a computer or mobile phone) when you visit a website or interact with a digital service. Similar technologies, such as tracking pixels and UTM tagged links, work in a comparable way. 

These technologies enable us to know when and how users have interacted with our digital content – for example by clicking a link or downloading a report on our website – so that we can understand user behaviour and improve the services we offer.  

Session cookies are placed on your device for the duration of your browsing session and are deleted when you close your browser. Persistent cookies remain on your device for a set period, or until you delete them.

How we ask for your consent

When you first visit our websites, we ask you to choose which cookies you are happy for us to use. We only use cookies that are strictly necessary for the site to work without asking you first. All other cookies are only set if you agree to them.

You can change your choices at any time by selecting ‘Manage consent’ at the bottom of any page on our website. If you withdraw consent, we will stop using those cookies from that point on.

The cookies we use

We group our cookies into the categories below, which match the choices in our consent tool. Full details of each cookie, including how long it lasts, are available through ‘Manage consent’.

Other websites, such as social media sites, may also set cookies if you click on links to their sites. Those cookies are controlled by them, not by us.

Managing cookies in your browser

As well as using ‘Manage consent’, you can restrict or block cookies through your browser settings. For more information, see your browser’s help function or handset user manual, or visit www.aboutcookies.org and www.allaboutcookies.org, which also explain how to delete cookies from your device. Please note that we can’t be responsible for the content of external websites.

Restricting or blocking cookies may affect how some parts of our websites work.

Online donations

Our online donations are managed by Raisely and Stripe (for single credit or debit card donations and Direct Debits). Donations can also be made through the third-party PayPal service and through other third-party sites, including JustGiving.

Credit card details are not kept by us following a transaction. More information about how we protect payment information is in the ‘Keeping your information secure’ section.

Social media and other websites

This notice does not apply to third-party sites that you may access from our websites. We encourage you to read the privacy policy of any third-party site before disclosing any personal information.

WHO WE SHARE YOUR INFORMATION WITH AND WHY

We commit to make all reasonable efforts to keep your details secure and will only share them with suppliers or professional agents working on our behalf, for example, organisations who send out our fundraising or marketing materials, or telephone agencies whom we might very occasionally use to make fundraising or admin calls or SMS (text messaging) messages on our behalf. We carefully select these partners and will only share information with them if we are confident that they will protect it, and we have a data protection agreement and contract in place with them that assures this.

We will not share your details with other organisations to use for their own purposes, other than where we are required to by law or as described in ‘Finding other people like you who might like to hear from us’ and ‘Advertising on other websites’, where advertising platforms such as Google and Meta may also use information in line with their own privacy policies. Hope and Homes for Children will not, under any circumstances, share with, or sell your personal information to any third party for marketing purposes and you will not receive direct offers from other companies or organisations as a result of giving your details to us.

We may also use other companies to provide services and process your personal information on our behalf, including delivering postal mail, making telephone calls when necessary to our supporters, sending emails, sending SMS messages, processing credit card payments, providing website analytics and analysing our supporter information as outlined above, to help us communicate with you in ways that are most appropriate to you and your interests. In some cases, our suppliers may use software which analyses publicly available information (as outlined above) to build up a picture about you based on information set out in the ‘Targeting our communications and researching our supporters’ section.

TRANSFERRING YOUR INFORMATION OUTSIDE THE UK

Some of our suppliers are based, or store data, outside the UK.

Where personal data is transferred outside the UK, we make sure it is protected by an appropriate safeguard. This will be either UK adequacy regulations (for example, the UK Extension to the EU–US Data Privacy Framework, where the recipient is certified to it) or contractual safeguards recognised under UK law, such as the International Data Transfer Agreement or the UK Addendum to the EU standard contractual clauses. You can contact us for more information about the safeguards we use.

KEEPING YOUR INFORMATION SECURE

Hope and Homes for Children takes the care of your information seriously and protects your personal information in a range of ways including secure servers, firewalls and SSL encryption or a comparable standard. We operate a policy of restricted, password-controlled access to any of your information which is stored on our systems.

When you donate online, any data sent to and from our secure servers is encrypted to help prevent fraud. We follow Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) requirements when processing card payments via our website.

CHILDREN’S INFORMATION

While we do not actively collect information from children (under 18s) in the UK, 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 Hope and Homes for Children events will have clear rules on whether or not children can take part, and the collection of information will be managed in accordance with each individual event, with appropriate safeguards in place.

If you have provided us with your contact details, for example, when making a donation, we will carry out an assessment of whether it would be fair and reasonable of us to use those details to send information about our work, fundraising or events and other information to you without asking for your consent (i.e. it is in the interests of our aims as a charity and will not cause undue prejudice to you). This is called a ‘legitimate interest assessment’. For marketing by email or text message we also follow the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations: we only send these where you have agreed to receive them or, where you have supported us before, under the ‘soft opt-in’ described above, and you can opt out at any time.

You can however opt out of or change the amount or type of marketing and fundraising communications we send you at any time by letting us know your communication preferences. We seek to make this easy for you by asking you to let us know about any preferences you have when we communicate with you, and you can also do this by using one of the methods outlined in the ‘Contacting us’ section.

We will ensure we have a legal basis to use your personal information for the other purposes mentioned in this notice. The legal bases we rely on are:

  • Where we have your specific consent to use your personal information for a specific purpose (for example, non-essential cookies on our websites)
  • Where we process your personal information for our legitimate interests (or those of a third party)
  • Where the processing of personal information is necessary to perform a contract with you (for example, where you have purchased a product from us)
  • Where the processing of personal information is necessary to comply with a legal or regulatory obligation that applies to us (for example, in some instances, we may be required to share your information with the Charity Commission, Information Commissioner’s Office, other regulators or law enforcement agencies) or to use your information for due diligence or ethical screening purposes

You can find out more about your data protection rights on the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) website.

YOUR RIGHTS

Accessing your information (a Subject Access Request)

You have the right to request access to the personal data we hold about you. To make a request, please email [email protected] or [email protected] with the subject line “Subject Access Request”.

Please include:

  • your full name
  • any email addresses or postal addresses that may help us identify your records (optional)

Where a request relates to sensitive personal data, we may ask you to provide further information to verify your identity before processing your request.

Asking us to amend, delete or restrict your information

If you believe the information we hold about you is incorrect, out of date or if there is no longer justification for us to hold it, you can ask for it to be updated, removed, restricted or blocked from our use by using any of the methods outlined in the ‘Contacting us’ section above.

Objecting to how we use your information

You can use the same process to object to the processing of some or all of your personal data by us, including profiling for direct marketing purposes.

Requesting your information so that you can use it elsewhere

You can ask for a copy of any personal information that you have provided to us in the past. We will provide it in a clear and easy to follow format of your choice.

Withdrawing your consent

Where we rely on your consent, you can withdraw it at any time – for marketing, by contacting us or using the unsubscribe link in our emails; for cookies, by using ‘Manage consent’ on our website. This won’t affect anything we did with your consent before you withdrew it.

Complaining to us or to the ICO

You have the right to make a complaint to us directly if you believe we have not handled your personal data in accordance with data protection law. You can do this by:

  • Email: [email protected]
  • Post: Data Protection, Hope and Homes for Children, Unit 6, Wilton Village, King Street, Wilton, SP2 0RS

We will acknowledge your complaint within 30 days and investigate it without undue delay. We will keep you informed of progress and write to you with the outcome. If you are not satisfied with our response, or prefer to go directly to the regulator, you also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office: https://ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint/

If your complaint relates to our fundraising activities rather than to data protection, please refer to our Fundraising Complaints Policy.

CHANGES TO THIS NOTICE

This notice is reviewed annually. Alterations to the notice may be made at any point to ensure it accurately reflects our commitment to you and our compliance with appropriate legislation. If we make significant changes which may affect you, we will let you know.

Please check this website from time to time for the latest version of this notice.

Updated October 2026