Our Privacy Statement
We take our data protection responsibilities very seriously. Your privacy is important to us and we are committed to being fully transparent about why and how we use your personal information.
This privacy statement explains what personal information we collect from you and how we use this information to support our mission of improving outcomes for disabled children in African countries. It also explains how we keep your data secure and what we will never do with your data.
1. Information about you
1.1. We will collect personal information from you only when you give it to us:
a. you contact us to enquire about our work e.g. via our website, via email or via post
b. you make a donation to Disability Africa either online or offline
c. when you subscribe to our updates e.g. by signing up with your email address on our website
1.2. This information may include your name, title, email address, physical address, telephone numbers and date of birth. We will also maintain records of donations that you have made and a record of your communication with Disability Africa.
2. Our use of this information
2.1. We will use this information to:
a. Maintain a list of people who have donated to support our work, so that we can keep them informed about our programmes in Africa and occasionally ask them to donate again
b. Maintain a list of people who have said that they do not want to receive updates from us, so that we don’t inadvertently contact them again
c. Claim Gift Aid on donations where possible, to increase the impact of our donors’ support (requires a name and address).
2.2. We will only contact you with information about our work (charity marketing) when we have your explicit consent to do so, or an unquestionable ‘legitimate interest’ in doing so as defined by the Data Protection Act (1998). We will consider your consent to receive marketing to be valid for an indefinite period of time (until such a time as you withdraw it). However, we will make it as easy as possible to ‘unsubscribe’ from our updates at any time.
2.3. We will never:
a. Share your personal information with any third parties for marketing purposes
b. Sell your personal information
c. Buy personal information from third parties
d. Use personal information to profile prospective donors
e. Hold sensitive information about our donors or supporters
3. Security
3.1. We take reasonable precautions to prevent the loss, misuse or alteration of any personal information that you give us.
3.2. Personal information is held and managed in a cloud-based online database system which is also used by many other charities.
3.3. We also hold some personal information on our email sending software, on our secure office server, and on our online donations platform.
3.4. The locations where personal data is held are all password protected. They are only accessible only by DA Staff, all of whom have been trained in data protection.
4. Cookies and Email Tracking
4.1. We may collect information about your computer, including where available your IP address, operating system and browser type, for system administration. This is statistical data about our users’ browsing actions and patterns, and does not identify any individual.
For the same reason, we may obtain information about your general internet usage by using a cookie file which is stored on the hard drive of your computer. Cookies contain information that is transferred to your computer’s hard drive. They help us to improve our site and to deliver a better and more personalised service. They enable us:
• To estimate our audience size and usage pattern.
• To store information about your preferences, and so allow us to customise our site according to your individual interests.
• To speed up your searches.
• To recognise you when you return to our site.
You may refuse to accept cookies by activating the setting on your browser which allows you to refuse the setting of cookies. However, if you select this setting you may be unable to access certain parts of our site. Unless you have adjusted your browser setting so that it will refuse cookies, our system will issue cookies when you log on to our site.
4.2. Our email software tracks ‘opens’ and ‘link clicks’. This helps us to send our subscribers more of what they are interested in.
5. Other information
5.1 If you would like us to correct or update any information, or if you would like information deleted from our records, then please email us at info@disability-africa.org.
5.2 This privacy statement may be occasionally updated, so please check it periodically. We will inform our subscribers if and when this happens.
5.3 Links within our sites to other websites are not covered by this privacy statement.