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Privacy Policy

 Introduction

This document explains how we, County Durham Community Foundation (the Foundation), process personal data that we receive or collect about living individuals.  The purpose of this document is to ensure that we are transparent and upfront with you about what personal data we hold about you and what we do with that information. 

Why do we need your information?

County Durham Community Foundation (the Foundation) provides grants that make a genuine difference to the lives of local people. We manage charitable funds, building up a source of long-term support for the communities of County Durham and Tees Valley and neighbouring regions. We are dedicated to helping communities grow by creating opportunities and tackling issues of disadvantage and exclusion. We use the personal data we receive to assist us in our work, with the core aim of benefitting communities, primarily of County Durham and Tees Valley but can be further afield that than this.

Whose data do we collect?

We hold data on those who have given financial or other support to the Foundation, those who might do, and those who apply to the Foundation for grants, whether on behalf of an organisation or personally.  

The Foundation collects information about you when you connect with us as a trustee, volunteer, newsletter recipient, partner or make a general enquiry. This may cover anything from your contact details to financial information, or your responses to questionnaires we’ve sent you and feedback you’ve provided.  

Where we need to collect personal information by law, or under the terms of an agreement we have with you, and you fail to provide that information when requested, we may not be able to perform the agreement we have or are trying to enter into with you and may therefore need to cancel that.

How we obtain your data

The majority of the information we hold about you has been provided directly to us by you, or by an organisation supporting you with your consent. In some cases we may collect data from a third party. 

Examples include where existing supporters feel you may be interested in supporting our work and suggest your name to us, or data collected via a service provider like Just Giving or Enthuse (online giving). We also collect data from publicly available sources. Examples include information gathered from news articles or online media, including social media like LinkedIn or Twitter.  We may also receive your data from third parties with whom we wish to merge or otherwise collaborate with.  

We may also use publicly available directories and similar information such as Companies’ House and the Charity Commission. Depending on your settings or the privacy policies for social media platforms such as Facebook, you may receive targeted advertisements through our use of social media audience tools. For example, Facebook’s ‘Lookalike Audiences’ programmes enable us to display adverts to our existing supporters when they visit Facebook, or other people who have similar interests to our supporters. If you see an advert for the Foundation on Facebook and you do not wish to, you can click the three dots in the top right of the advert and amend your settings or find out why you are seeing the advert.

What we do with your data and why

We process personal data to enable us to further our charitable objects, which are broadly to promote lasting charitable giving, by bringing together donors with their chosen causes, through well targeted grants that make a genuine difference to the lives of local people. 

Your personal information may be used by us (including our staff) and disclosed to third parties (including the third parties from whom we receive your personal information). We will use the information you provide to: 

  • fulfil your requests – such as applications for grants and bursaries
  • process donations or other payments and verify financial transactions
  • provide a personalised service to you when you visit our websites, e.g. Fund holder and Trustee log ins
  • record any contact we have with you
  • prevent or detect fraud or abuses of our website and enable third parties to carry out technical, logistical or other functions on our behalf
  • to carry out research on the demographics, interests and behaviour of our users and supporters to help us gain a better understanding of them and to enable us to improve our service. This research may be shared internally and with our Trustees
  • communicate with our supporters, donors, fund holders and potential supporters about the work of the Foundation
  • if you have agreed to it, provide you with information that we think may be of interest to you. 

Supporters and Volunteers

As noted above, we process personal data to enable us to further our charitable objects. Tied to that, we process personal data to: 

  • build financial and volunteer support for the Foundation through various fundraising and marketing activities
  • send communications to you about the Foundation
  • administer donations (including but not limited to funds which are subject to Fund/Donor Services Agreements)
  • administer membership schemes
  • promote the aims and objectives of the Foundation through other activities. 

We may use data obtained other than from you to ensure that your contact details are up to date, to plan our fundraising (including from time to time using indicators of affluence so as to reflect the possible level of donation someone is able to make) and to ensure that appropriate due diligence is carried out to safeguard the assets and reputation of the Foundation. 

We collect the following classes of information:

  • Name(s) and address, email, phone number and other relevant contact details and communication preferences
  • Relevant family or friends’ information including information on successor advisors
  • Occupation, interests and professional activity and network(s)
  • Financial information and interest in philanthropy
  • Information relating to links and connections with and in North East England
  • Records of donations including assets used to make donations, Gift Aid status etc.
  • Records of volunteering for the Foundation
  • Information about our relationship with you, correspondence, meeting notes, attendance at events etc.
  • Information necessary for us to manage funds you have established or supported, including information on successor advisors 

We do not, as a matter of routine, collect any special categories of personal information (this includes details about a person’s race or ethnicity, religious or philosophical beliefs, sex life, sexual orientation, political opinion and health information) or any information about criminal convictions and offences.  We ask that you do not provide us with any special categories of personal data or criminal conviction data unless we are contractually obliged by our third party funders (or other organisations) to capture that from you, or unless we consider it necessary for you to do so.  

Information on Grantees

We collect the information described below in order to solicit and process applications for grants from the Foundation. Some of the information may also be processed in the ways described above under “Supporters and Volunteers” since some grantees also volunteer for the Foundation or support its work in some way. 

We collect the following classes of information: 

  • Name(s) and address, email, phone number and other relevant contact details and preferences
  • Purpose and details about an application for a grant
  • Any other information needed for the assessment of a grant which may include financial, family,
    education and employment information
  • Details about any grant which was made
  • Information about our relationship with you, correspondence, meeting notes, attendance at events etc.
  • Appropriate information supplied in the grant application that relates to the beneficiaries of the grant
  • Specific information relating to the criteria of the Foundation programmes and funds. This may include information about personal circumstances, and date of birth (eg. for employability grant schemes). 

Protecting your data

We keep your data secure in our database with appropriate security mechanisms in place to prevent your personal data from being accidentally lost, used or accessed in an unauthorised way, altered or disclosed.  We also limit access to your personal data to those employees, workers, agents etc and other third parties who have a business, legal or regulatory need-to-know.  

Examples are given below: 

  • We will provide information to HMRC on Gift Aided donations since we have a legal obligation to provide this information.
  • We will share information on grant applicants with grant panel members, donors and external assessors. We will also typically publish data in on our website and in our annual review on grant recipients for groups/organisations (amounts/names/purpose) but we anonymise details for any individual grantees, as agreed in the terms and conditions of each grant.
  • We may share basic information on the attenders at an event or function or meeting with the host or other person who has a volunteer role within the Foundation.
  • We may pass data to other organisations, known as processors, to provide specific services to us. An example would be providing data to a mailing house in order to send a newsletter. A contract is always in place with a processor, and they are not allowed to do anything with your data other than that which we have requested.
  • We may need to pass your data to our professional advisers (e.g. our legal advisers) should we require advice from those on, say, an issue which relates to you. 

Transfers outside the UK 

Some of our suppliers may run their operations outside of the UK and even the European Economic Area (EEA). Although they may not be subject to the same data protection laws as companies based in the UK, we will take steps to make sure that we only use suppliers which provide an adequate level of protection in accordance with UK data protection law.  

Before transferring any personal data to third parties outside of the UK we will ensure that the personal data transferred is kept to a minimum and we will require those third parties to respect the security of your personal data and to treat it in accordance with relevant data protection legislation.  

Our responsibilities

The law requires us to tell you the basis on which we process your data. If the law requires your consent to process data in a certain way then we will obtain it before carrying out that activity.

Other activities are carried out usually to fulfil a contract or agreement. Examples include holding funds which are subject to Fund / Donor Agreements or organising a ticketed event. Each requires us to know who you are and to process your information in order to do the thing you have asked us to do. If a contract is  in place then we will process your data based on that contract. 

In all other cases the law allows us to process your data if it is in our legitimate interest or a third party’s legitimate interest to do so For example, it is in our legitimate interests, and the legitimate interests of our (future) beneficiaries, that personal data is disclosed to or received from a third party with whom we intend to merge or otherwise collaborate with in order to ensure the continuity and quality of our businesses and the services that we both provide. 

Automated Decision-Making 

Please note that you will not be subject to decisions that will have a significant impact on you based solely on automated decision-making.  

Data retention 

We will keep data for as long as is necessary for the purpose for which it was collected and to satisfy audit, regulatory and legal requirements. The exact period will therefore depend on the purpose for which we hold your personal data, and the type of personal data held.  For example, where we hold personal data: 

  • To comply with a legal or regulatory obligation, we will keep that information for at least as long as is required to comply with that obligation. 
  • To deal with a complaint that you have raised, we will keep the information for a period of seven years following resolution of the complaint. 
  • To help up to improve our services, we will hold your personal information for at least as long as required to design, implement and monitor any such improvements. 

We may extend the period for which we keep your personal information in the event that legal proceedings are brought in relation to or involving you. In those circumstances we may need to retain some relevant personal information for as long as is necessary for the purposes of such litigation. 

Relationships between donors, grantees and the Foundation are often long term, and so we expect to keep your data for as long as that relationship exists, until we no longer need it or you have withdrawn your consent (and we have no legal obligation to continue to hold it). 

Your rights

The law requires us to tell you that you have a variety of rights about the way we process your data. These are as follows: 

Your rights  Summary of Your Rights
 
Right of access to your personal data  You have the right to receive a copy of your personal data that we hold about you. 
Right to rectify your personal data  You have the right to ask us to correct the personal data that we hold about you where it is incorrect or incomplete. If any of the personal data that we hold about you changes then we encourage you to please let us know as soon as possible so that we can ensure our records about you are accurate and up-to-date. 
Right to erasure of your personal data  You have the right to request that we erase all data we hold about you if the data is no longer being used for the purposes you have consented to or if you revoke any consent given to us processing that data 
Right to restrict the use of your personal data  You have the right to request that we suspend our use of your personal data in certain circumstances. 
Right to data portability  You have the right to request that we copy or transfer your personal data to another service provider. 
Right to object to the use of your personal data  You have the right to object to the use of your persona data. 
Right to withdraw consent  You have the right to withdraw your consent at any time where we rely on consent to process your personal data. 
Right to complain to the data protection regulator for England and Wales i.e the ICO  Please see section below. 

How to complain

If you have any concerns about our use of your personal information, you can make a complaint to us at the details noted at the end of this policy.

You can also complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) if you are unhappy with how we have used your data.

The ICO’s address:
Information Commissioner’s Office
Wycliffe House
Water Lane
Wilmslow
Cheshire
SK9 5AF

Helpline number: 0303 123 1113

ICO website: https://www.ico.org.uk

Changes to this document 

We may update this privacy policy at any time.  The changes will come into effect once this policy is published on our website.  

Contacting us
If you have any questions about this privacy notice, about the way in which we process your data, or if you wish to change the way we use your data, including how we communicate with you, please contact us:

County Durham Community Foundation
Victoria House
Whitfield Court
Meadowfield Industrial Estate
Durham
DH7 8XL

T: 0191 378 6340

E: info@cdcf.org.uk