Privacy Policy

How we use your data

If you decide not to provide the information requested, we may be unable to help and support you in the service you require such as giving a donation, receiving a piece of equipment on free loan.

We will use the information you provide to:

• Review services provided, including distribution of equipment and identify any improvements that can be undertaken.
• Fulfil your requests – such as referrals for equipment and provision of information.
• Process donations or other payments and verify financial transactions.
• Comply with charity law and other regulations.
• Handle referrals, deliver products and communicate with you.
• Record any contact with have with you.
• Providing tailored stewardship.
• Prevent and detect fraud or abuses of our website and enable third parties to carry out technical functions on our behalf.
• Communicate with our supporters and customers, including marketing and promotion.
• Carry our research and analyse on the demographic, interests, behaviour, responses and feedback of our donors and beneficiaries. This helps us gain a better understanding of them and to enable us to improve our service. This research may be carried out internally by our employees or volunteers, or we may ask another company to do this work for us where appropriate contracts are in place.
• Maintain a historical record of BWBF’s activities.
• Organise and administer events and plan fundraising activities.
• Manage employees and volunteers, including training and competencies.
• Manage BWBF operations, including head office site and facilities.
• Safeguard employees, visitors and members of the public.

Records created by your interactions with BWBF

Your interactions with BWBF may also result in personal data being created. For example, if you make a donation, the date and amount, and what the donations was in respect of will be recorded.

BWBF process payment information by several methods. Where payments are made using a debit or credit card, BWBF does not store or retain the card information.

Information from third parties

We may combine your personal data with publicly available information such as the Electoral Roll or the Royal Mail Change of Address List to minimise the risk and cost of sending communications that do not reach or would not be appropriate to you and to personalise interactions with you.

We may share information with organisations only where necessary and covered by a contract, but these could include:

• Print and fulfilment firms, including couriers.
• Event providers.
• Giving Platforms (for example, JustGiving).
• Media and Social Media Companies.
• Financial institutions (for example, banks, payment providers and HM Revenue and Customs)
• Legal Firms, institutions and professional (for example, solicitors, employment tribunal).
• Employment organisations ( for example, recruitment agencies, credit agencies, expense providers, car leasing)
• Insurance providers.

Visual imagery data

BWBF captures images from all events attended, capturing these visuals are used to promote our work (where appropriate consents are in place) and are used to raise vital funds to ensure our activities can be financially sustained into the future.

In additional, visual imagery may be captured in the form of photography and visual footage from events.

BWBF also used Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) at their head office to:

• Prevent and detect crime.
• Protect BWBF’s building and their assets.
• Increase personal safety and reduce the fear of crime.
• Support law enforcement agencies in a bid to deter and detect crime.
• Assist in identifying, apprehending, and prosecuting offenders.
• Protect members of the public and private property.

CCTV footage will not be used for any other purposes and its use will be reviewed regularly. CCTV images will be retained for no longer than 30 days, after which they will be disposed of, unless there is an ongoing reason to keep them for the purposes named above. CCTV images are stored securely and can only be accessed by authorised individuals. With the exception of law enforcement bodies in the instance of crime, auditors or insurance companies in the instance of damage to property, images will not be provided to third parties.

Lawful Basis for Processing Your Personal Data

Personal information

Data protection law requires us to identify the lawful basis under which we collect and use your personal information. Depending on why we process your data one, or sometimes more than one of the following bases may be relevant.

• Legitimate Interest - processing where we consider it is in the legitimate interest of BWBF to process your data. We will always balance any potential impact on you and your rights against the identified legitimate interests.
• Consent – where you have given your consent for BWBF to use your personal data for a particular purpose.
• Legal obligation – where the processing of personal data is required to ensure compliance with a legal obligation.
• Contract - where the processing of personal data is required to meet our contractual obligations.
• Vital Interest – in rare cases we may process personal data under the basis of vital interests where necessary to protect life.

Special Category Data

Where we do process special category information such as health data, we need an additional legal basis to do so. We may do this under:

• Explicit consent
• Employment, social security and social protection
• Health or social care
• Vital interests
• Archiving, research and statistics

How we use your information for marketing

Marketing information may include information from BWBF about the goods and services available, fundraising appeals, and information about our rescues and the other work we do.

We may send you communications about our news, activities and appeals by post or phone unless you have previously told us that you do not want to be contacted in this way. We rely on legitimate interest for this processing as we believe BWBF has a legitimate interest in promoting the charity.

We will send marketing information by email if you have consented to receive information this way. You can unsubscribe from these messages at any time by clicking the unsubscribe link to withdraw your consent.

You can add, amend, or remove your marketing preferences at any time by:

• Clicking the unsubscribe option on all marketing emails.
• Emailing mydata@blind.org.uk
• Calling our head office on 01622 754757

If you ask us to stop sending marketing information, we will update your record and do so as quickly as we can, but please note that occasionally you may receive further mailings that are already in the progress.

Profiling and Segmentation

Profiling and segmentation allow BWBF to manage their resources more efficiently by providing information which helps us to continually review and improve our fundraising and services.

To create a profile, we (or one of our trusted third parties) may combine information you provide to us with publicly available data such as house prices, salaries in your area, your interests, or your estimated wealth. We typically use sources such as the Electoral Roll, Office National Statistics, and credit score companies to inform our research.

Using this information, we may segment our supporter database, putting supporters into groups with similar characteristics. We may use this information to help us determine if you might be interested in getting involved in other fundraising or volunteering activities or to send information that we feel may be of interest.

We believe we have a legitimate interest in undertaking this work which allows us to understand our supporters further so we can:

• ensure communications are relevant and timely.
• ensure we send information that we believe is of interest to you (for example appeals in your local area).
• understand how you may be able to help us in the future.
• raise funds in the most cost-effective ways, ensuring we spend donor’s money wisely.
• exclude anyone who may be vulnerable from receiving marketing e.g. under 18’s or people living in care.

If you would prefer us not to use your personal data in this way, please email mydata@blind.org.uk or call us on 01622 754757.

Creating research profiles

We may carry out work to identify individuals who have potential as high value donors or advocates. We do this by researching individuals who we believe may have an interest in BWBF. We may also research some of our existing supporters, volunteers and advocates and their networks with the aim of asking them to introduce us to potential high value donors or advocates we have identified.

We may create a research profile when preparing for one-to-one meetings and bespoke events using publicly available or paid for information such as Companies House or data analytics companies. These sources can also help us identify new potential supporters who may have an interest in our work.

We will also undertake research for due diligence purposes on major donations to ensure we can accept the donation in line with our Donation Acceptance Policy.

Once a research profile is created for any of the purposes outlined, we will either:

• decide to take it no further, in which case we will securely delete the profile,
• or aim contact the individual within 30 days to tell them about our work, direct them to our privacy policy and give them the opportunity to cease all contact at this stage.

Research profiles will only be retained for as long as required to fulfil the purpose after which they will be securely deleted.

As a charitable organisation funded by donations, we believe we have a legitimate interest in identifying and researching potential high value donors or advocates using the methods described to help us focus our conversations about fundraising or volunteering in the most effective way.

If you would prefer us not to use your personal data in this way, please email mydata@blind.org.uk or call us on 01622 754757.

We will only ever use social media platforms (such as Facebook and X) in accordance with their own terms and conditions. If you have an account on one of these platforms, you will have agreed to these terms and conditions yourself. All social media platforms must comply with data protection laws when processing or storing the personal data of individuals from the UK and Ireland and have a responsibility to store and process data in a fair and transparent way.

Custom Audiences 

If you have given us permission to use your email address, we may match it with your social media accounts so we can share relevant information with you such as fundraising events linked to your interests. We also do this to exclude some of our supporters from social media advertising to make sure we’re not wasting BWBF’s funds on communications which aren’t relevant to you.

Media

BWBF uses public and social media channels to promote the work that we do. If you take part in a BWBF activity, planned or unplanned, we may seek your permission to use your personal data in media activity. In some cases, where a story is deemed newsworthy it may not be possible to obtain your consent prior to use. These will be infrequent, and we will employ high ethical standards to ensure that graphic, embarrassing or inappropriate material is not publicised. We will always consider the impact to the data subjects before agreeing to release data.

Sharing your information

We will only share your information if:

• we’re legally required to do so, for example by a law enforcement agency legitimately exercising a power or if compelled by an order of the court.
• we believe it’s necessary to protect or defend our rights, property or the personal safety of our people or visitors to our premises or website.
• we’re working with carefully selected partners that are carrying out work on our behalf, such as mailing houses, marketing agencies, IT specialists and research firms. The kind of work we may ask them to do includes:
  • processing, packaging, mailing, and delivering purchases.
  • answering questions about products or services.
  • sending postal mail, emails and text messages, carrying out research or analysis.
  • processing card payments:

We only choose partners we can trust. We will only pass personal data to them if they have signed a contract or agreed to terms of service that require them to:

• abide by the requirements of the Data Protection Act, General Data Protection Regulation and successive legislation.
• treat your information as carefully as we could.
• only use the information for the purposes for which it was supplied (and not for their own purposes or the purposes of any other organisation)
• allow us to carry out checks to ensure they are doing all these things.

We never sell or share your information to other organisations to use for their own purposes.

Storing your information

Information is stored by us on computers located in the UK (including Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man) and the Republic of Ireland. In addition, we may process your data in other countries both within and outside the European Economic Area but only where tightly controlled by appropriate contractual arrangements. We may also store information in paper files.

We place great importance on the security of all information. We have security measures in place to protect against the loss, misuse and alteration of data under our control. For example, we control who can access each of our systems and we use encryption on our website data before it is sent to us.

Unfortunately, the transmission of data across the internet is not completely secure. While we do our best to try to protect the security of your information, we encourage the safe sharing of data across the internet and advise that care is taken when sending personal, or sensitive data over a public connection.

We cannot ensure or guarantee that loss, misuse or alteration of data will not occur while data is being transferred.

Where you or we have provided a password enabling you to access parts of our websites or use our services, it is your responsibility to keep this password confidential. Please don't share your password with anyone.

How long we keep your personal information

We keep your information only for as long as we need it to.

• Provide you with the goods, services or information you have requested.
• Administer your relationship with us.
• Carry out profiling, segmentation and research as outlined in the relevant sections above.
• Send you relevant materials we believe may be of interest to you in accordance with our contact policy.

When we no longer need information, we always dispose of it securely, using specialist companies if required. We have an information and data retention policy, which we review regularly.

Some personal information we hold is retained to fulfil statutory obligations, for example there is an HMRC requirement to retain of Gift Aid declarations for a period of 6 years.

Your rights

The UK General Data Protection Regulation (UKGDPR) gives you certain rights over your data and how we use it. These include the right to:

• access to the personal information we hold about you, known as a subject access request.
• object to our processing (automated or otherwise) of your personal information.
• object to your information being used for marketing purposes.
• restrict the processing of your personal information.
• obtain a copy of your personal data in a portable format so that you can reuse it.
• rectify your personal information if you believe it is incorrect – we want to ensure that all information we hold about you is accurate and up to date so please do let us know if anything changes.
• request the erasure of your personal information (please note that in certain circumstances we may need to retain your data for a specified period to comply with our legal obligations).

If you make a request relating to any of the rights listed above, we will consider each request in accordance with all applicable data protection laws and regulations. No administration fee will be charged for complying with such a request unless the request is deemed to be excessive in nature.

If you would prefer us not to use your personal data in this way, please email mydata@blind.org.uk or call us on 01622 754757.

You can find more information about your rights under data protection legislation from the Information Commissioner’s Office at https://ico.org.uk