Privacy Policy

Tees Valley Wildlife Trust is part of the influential UK-wide partnership of 47 Wildlife Trusts. The Trust has worked for more than 40 years to protect wildlife and wild places, and educate, influence and empower people. We manage 15 nature reserves and help others to manage their countryside sites. Our work is helping to secure the future of many important habitats and species, which might otherwise be lost.

We protect the wildlife where you live. We make our area a better place for local wildlife and people.

We all know that wild places are under daily threat, as our towns develop and our countryside changes. Despite our successes, wildlife is still being lost at an alarming rate. The Trust needs your help and support to continue and expand its work.

This policy applies to your interactions with Tees Valley Wildlife Trust. Each Wildlife Trust has its own privacy policy. For details, visit the website of the Trust concerned.

We are committed to keeping your personal details safe. This policy explains how and why we use your personal data, to ensure that you remain informed and in control of your information.

Any references to Tees Valley Wildlife Trust, or to ‘we’ or ‘us’ refer to:
• Tees Valley Wildlife Trust. We are a registered charity in England and Wales, and our registered charity number is 511068.

We use three key definitions to describe people mentioned in this policy. These are definitions enshrined in GDPR and used by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the UK’s independent body set up to uphold information rights (www.ico.org.uk)

• ‘Data subject’: this is you. As the data subject, we respect your right to control your data.
• ‘Data controller’: this is us, Tees Valley Wildlife Trusts. We determine why and how your personal data is used (as outlined in this policy).

• ‘Data processor’: this is an organisation that processes data on behalf of Tees Valley Wildlife Trust or at Tees Valley Wildlife Trust's discretion. Tees Valley Wildlife Trust takes full responsibility for what they do.

When we work with other organisations or individuals in this way, we always set up a written contract with them to protect your data. The third parties we work with at no point ‘own’ your data, so you will never hear from them independently and they will always delete your data from their systems when they have completed the task in hand. We always send your data to partner organisations securely, to minimise the risk of it being intercepted by unknown individuals and/or organisations.

We will never sell your personal data.

Should you wish to find out more about the information we hold about you, or about our privacy policy, please contact us:

Phone: 01287636382
Email: [email protected]
Margrove Heritage Centre, Margrove Park, Boosbeck, Saltburn-by-the-Sea, TS12 3BZ

Our office hours are Monday – Friday, 9am – 5pm.

We use your personal data to keep in touch with you.

We will only ever collect, store and use your personal data when we have an identified purpose and reason to do so. The ICO refers to this as a ‘lawful basis’. Further information about why we collect your personal data is outlined below.

a) To administer your donations

We collect your personal data to administer your donations, which may involve:

• Sending you a thank you letter or email.

• Getting in touch if there are any issues processing your donation.

The lawful basis for processing your data for these purposes may be ‘contractual’ or 'legitimate interest'.

b) To send you items purchased from our online shop

We collect your personal data to send you:

• Items you have purchased from our online shop.

The lawful basis for processing your data for these purposes is ‘contractual’.

c) To send you information about our work

We also collect your personal data so that we can send you information about our work that we feel will be of interest to you, this includes fundraising appeals, campaigning opportunities, Wildlife Watch and other activities.

This information is in addition to that outlined in sections a) and b) and is interpreted as ‘direct marketing’ by the ICO.

Your personal data also helps us to get to know you better and to develop a ‘profile’ of you on our secure supporter database. This ‘profile’ enables us to send you the information listed above in a timely and relevant way, to suit you. For example, keeping track of the donations you make to our organisation helps us to send you information about fundraising appeals that we feel you would like to hear about.

We also use your data to analyse and refine our campaigning, advertising and other operations to increase our effectiveness and allow us to refine our audiences to make sure the ads you’re seeing are relevant to you, this process could include uploading data to various advertising platforms that the Wildlife Trusts uses.  

We may use your data when using social media advertising platform advertising tools, to further ensure that our advertising campaigns are as effective as possible, by making sure both our budget is used effectively and the ads that you see are relevant to you. This means we can target based on specific characteristics and interests. We collect the data from campaigns, adverts, posts and interactions with our website and social platforms.

Processing this information may also help us to evaluate how we are performing in terms of our charitable objectives. Doing this enables us to track and keep you updated about how we are caring for wildlife and wild places, and inspiring and empowering people to take action for nature.

We use two different lawful bases for processing your data for ‘direct marketing’ purposes:

i) Legitimate interest

This is where we have identified a genuine and legitimate reason (see section 3c) for contacting you, which crucially does not override your rights or interests

We use legitimate interest to send you the information listed above by post or telephone (if you are not registered with the Telephone Preference Service, and you have given us your phone number).

ii) Opt-in consent

This is where you have given us express permission to contact you by particular communication channels.

We use opt-in consent to send you the information listed above by email, text message (SMS) or telephone (if you are registered with the Telephone Preference Service)

We respect your right to update the way we get in touch with you about our work at any time.

d) To enable you to volunteer with us

If you are a Tees Valley Wildlife Trust volunteer, we collect your personal data so that we can keep in touch with you about, for example:

• Changes to planned volunteer work programmes that you may be taking part in.

• The positive impact you have on our work.

 

a) Basic information

We will usually collect basic information about you, including your name, postal address, phone number, email address and your bank details if you are supporting us financially. 

Most of the time, we collect this data from you directly. Sometimes this is in person; other times, it is over the phone, in writing or through an email. Occasionally we obtain information, such as your phone number or other contact details, from external sources (only where you have given permission for such information to be shared).

b) Getting to know you better

We also collect information about you that helps us to get to know you better. This may include:

• Records of donations you’ve made.

• Your preferences of how you would like us to contact you.

• Ways you’ve helped us through volunteering your time.

• Records of events you’ve attended, or campaigns or activities that you’ve been involved in.

Sometimes we will collect other information about you such as your date of birth and gender. When we do so, we will be very clear as to why we are collecting such information, and we will only do so with your specific consent and permission.

Once again, most of the time we collect this data from you directly.

We may also collect demographic and consumption data generated through geodemographic tools (such as CACI Acorn), as well as information related to your wealth. This may include information from public registers and other publicly available sources such as Companies House, newspapers and magazines. If you do not wish your data to be collected in any of these ways, or have questions about them, please contact us.

Other ways in which we collect personal data to get to know you better include:

i) Our website.

Our website uses ‘cookies’ to help provide you with the best experience we can. Cookies are small text files that are placed on your computer or mobile phone when you browse websites.

Our cookies help us:

• Make our website work as you'd expect.

• Remember your settings during and between visits.

• Improve the speed/security of the site.

• Allow you to share pages with social networks like Facebook.

• Continuously improve our website for you.

c) Sensitive personal data

We do not normally collect or store sensitive personal data, also known as special category data, (such as information relating to health, beliefs or political affiliation) about supporters. However, there are some situations where this will occur.

When we do so, we will be very clear as to why we are collecting such information. In most cases we will only collect such information with your specific consent and permission. In these situations, we collect the data from you directly. There are limited cases where permission is not required for processing special category data.

If you are a volunteer then we may collect extra information about you, for example:

• References.

• Criminal records checks.

• Details of emergency contacts.

• Medical conditions.

We may also collect sensitive personal data in case of an accident on our premises. This information will be retained for legal reasons, for safeguarding purposes and to protect us (including in the event of an insurance or legal claim). If this does occur, we’ll take extra care to ensure your privacy rights are protected.

d) Children and young people 

In line with data protection law, if we receive any information through any data collection channel that indicates an individual is under 13 years old age, we will not store or process that individual’s personal details, unless we have the express permission from the individual's parent or guardian to do so.
 

a) Security

All of the personal data we process is processed by our staff in the UK. However, for the purposes of IT hosting and maintenance your information may be situated outside of the European Economic Area (EEA). This will be done in accordance with guidance issued by the Information Commissioner’s Office.

Electronic data and databases are stored on secure computer systems and we control who has access to information (using both physical and electronic means). Our staff receive data protection training and we have a set of detailed data protection procedures which personnel are required to follow when handling personal data.

b) Payment security

All electronic Tees Valley Wildlife Trust forms that request financial data will use the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol to encrypt the data between your browser and our servers.

If you use a credit card to donate, purchase a membership or purchase something online we will pass your credit card details securely to our payment provider (Stripe; PayPal). Other payment methods (such as Apple Pay) are handled in a similar manner.

Tees Valley Wildlife Trust complies with the payment card industry data security standard (PCI-DSS) published by the PCI Security Standards Council, and will never store card details. 

Of course, we cannot guarantee the security of your home computer or the internet, and any online communications (such as information provided by email or our website) are at the user’s own risk.

c) Data retention policy

We will only use and store information for as long as it is required for the purposes it was collected for. We continually review what information we hold, and delete what is no longer required.

We would also like to state that only those who have authorisation within Tees Valley Wildlife Trust have access to your personal data and all staff are trained in data protection and are compliant in making sure that this is used in the correct manner. Those who have access to personal data will only do so for the necessary tasks and will make sure to handle this data in the safest way possible. We will never use your data for anything other than what is stated within our privacy policy.  

We respect your right to control your data. Your rights include:

a) The right to be informed 

This privacy notice outlines how we capture, store and use your data. If you have any questions about any elements of this policy, please contact us.

b) The right of access

If you wish to obtain a record of the personal data we hold about you, through a Subject Access Request, we will respond within one month.

c) The right to rectification

If we have captured information about you that is inaccurate or incomplete, we will update it.

d) The right to erase

You can ask us to remove or randomise your personal details from our records.

e) The right to restrict processing

You can ask us to stop using your personal data.

f) The right to data portability

You can ask to obtain your personal data from us for your own purposes.

g) The right to object

You can ask to be excluded from marketing activity.

h) Rights in relation to automated decision making and profiling

We respect your right not to be subject to a decision that is based on automated processing.

For more information on your individual rights, please see the Information Commissioner’s Office.

Tees Valley Wildlife Trust wants to exceed your expectations in everything we do. However, we know that there may be times when we do not meet our own high standards. When this happens, we want to hear about it, in order to deal with the situation as quickly as possible and put measures in place to stop it happening again.

We take complaints very seriously and we treat them as an opportunity to develop our approach. This is why we are always very grateful to hear from people who are willing to take the time to help us improve.

Our policy is:

• To provide a fair complaints procedure that is clear and easy to use for anyone wishing to make a complaint.

• To publicise the existence of our complaints procedure so that people know how to contact us to make a complaint.

• To make sure everyone in our organisation knows what to do if a complaint is received.

• To make sure all complaints are investigated fairly and in a timely way.

• To make sure that complaints are, wherever possible, resolved and that relationships are repaired.

• To learn from complaints and feedback to help us to improve what we do.

Confidentiality

All complaint information will be handled sensitively, in line with relevant data protection requirements.

Information Commissioner’s Office

For further assistance with complaints regarding your data, please contact the Information Commissioner’s Office, whose remit covers the UK.

Information Commissioner’s Office
Wycliffe House
Water Lane
Wilmslow
SK9 5AF

Phone: 0303 123 1113
Email: [email protected]

Our website uses cookies, as almost all websites do, to help provide you with the best experience we can. Cookies are small text files that are placed on your computer or mobile phone when you browse websites.

Our cookies help us:

• Make our website work as you'd expect
• Remember your settings during and between visits
• Improve the speed/security of the site
• Allow you to share pages with social networks like Facebook
• Continuously improve our website for you

We do NOT use cookies to:

• Collect any personally identifiable information (without your express permission)
• Collect any sensitive information (without your express permission)
• Pass personally identifiable data to third parties
• Pay sales commissions

You can learn more about all the cookies we use below.

 

Cookie provider: Tees Valley Wildlife Trust

Purpose: Used by the website to remember cookie preferences.

Cookies: cookie-agreed, MCPopupClosed

 

Cookie provider: Facebook

Purpose: Used by Facebook for sharing content, conversion tracking, optimisation, creating audiences for Facebook Ads and marketing.

Cookies: _fbp, fr

Provider policy: Facebook

 

Cookie provider: Paypal

Purpose: Used to support payment services.

Cookies: AKDC, LANG, X-PP-SILOVER, akavpau_ppsd, enforce_policy, nsid, ts, ts_c, tsrce, x-csrf-jwt, x-pp-s

Provider policy: Paypal

 

Cookie provider: Vimeo

Purpose: Used to embed videos from Vimeo using cookies that we consider essential to the video player experience. Does not use third-party analytics or advertising cookies.

Cookies: player, vuid

Provider policy: Vimeo

 

Cookie provider: Eventbrite

Purpose: Used to deliver event booking services and content tailored to the user’s interests.

Cookies: _ga, _gat, _gid, AS, csrftoken, eblang, G, janus_re, mgref, SP, SS, ebGAClientId, lux_uid, SERVERID

Provider policy: Eventbrite

 

Cookie provider: New Relic

Purpose: Anonymously maintains a user’s browsing session on the website to allow us to monitor and troubleshoot website performance.

Cookies: JSESSIONID

Provider policy: New Relic

 

Cookie provider: Google

Purpose: Used to understand website usage including how users found and explored our site and how their experience can be enhanced. Google also provides campaign tracking, advertising and website functionality services.

Cookies: IDE, _ga, _gat, _gat_UA-xxxxxxx-xx, _gid

Provider policy: Google

 

Cookie provider: Stripe

Purpose: Used for making card transactions on the website. Provided by Stripe.com which allows online transactions without storing any credit card information.

Cookies: __stripe_mid, __stripe_sid

Provider policy: Stripe

 

Most web browsers allow some control of most cookies through the browser settings. To find out more about cookies, including how to see what cookies have been set and how to manage and delete them, visit www.allaboutcookies.org

To opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics across all websites visit http://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout

We are not responsible for the privacy practices or the content of any other websites linked to our website. If you have followed a link from this website to another website you may be supplying information to a third party.

We will never sell your personal data. When sharing your data with us, if you have opted-in to receive further contact, we may get in touch with information about our partners, or third party products and services, but these communications will always come from Tees Valley Wildlife Trust. In some circumstances where we are using subcontractors or suppliers we may share your personal data so that they can carry out their contractual services. For example, if you order something from a Wildlife Trust shop that uses a third party delivery company, your name and address will be shared with them. Occasionally, where we partner with other organisations, we may also share information with them (for example our Wild About Gardens campaign which is a partnership campaign with The RHS). 

The Wildlife Trusts federation

The Wildlife Trusts is made up of 47 individual charities that work closely together in a federated structure through their membership of The Royal Society of Wildlife Trusts, a memorandum of co-operation and a collective strategic direction. The Wildlife Trust federation also includes a range of subsidiaries, wholly owned by either an individual or group of Wildlife Trusts. Whilst operating collectively within a federated structure, it is recognised that each party is an independent organisation. To aide our collaboration as a federation, we sometimes share data with each other for the purposes listed below. At all times we follow the principle of data minimisation as set out in UK GDPR and where possible or appropriate will anonymise or pseudonymise data before it is shared. 

The Wildlife Trusts have identified the following broad purposes for data sharing and processing:

People and community

• To deepen understanding of and enhance engagement with current and potential supporters, improving inclusivity, recruitment and retention experiences.
• To gain insights into supporter and public behaviour through research and data analysis.
• To support education and training.
• To foster community building, health initiatives, and empower local networks. 

Business operations

• To identify funding opportunities, resources, and drive cost efficiencies.
• To facilitate delivery of shared services across The Wildlife Trusts’ federation.
• To establish benchmarking, KPIs and qualitative data analysis that measure and communicate our collective impact.
• To uphold safety and ensure compliance with shared policies, regulatory and industry best practices.
• To facilitate appropriate safeguarding measures across the federation to protect children and adults at risk.
• To improve understanding of our partners, including corporates, through collaborative business intelligence.
• To support the experience, retention, training and recruitment of staff, trustees, and volunteers.
• To explore and implement emerging technologies (such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Internet of Things) that enhance conservation impact, operational efficiency, and supporter engagement across The Wildlife Trusts.
• To enhance collaboration with partners locally, nationally and globally.
• To support the digital transformation and data maturity of The Wildlife Trusts. 

Conservation

• To identify, commission and/or contribute to external research efforts locally, nationally or globally, that enhance The Wildlife Trusts' conservation impact.
• To support environmental conservation and research locally, nationally or globally.
• To support international, national and local campaigns and advocacy. 

Data sharing across The Wildlife Trusts federation is governed by a comprehensive collective Data Sharing, Processing and Joint Controllership Agreement.

If you'd like find out more about the information we hold about you, or about our privacy policy, please contact us.