Our privacy policy How we keep your personal data safe

Personal data is any information that can be used to identify you or another person. For example, if you donate money, use our services or visit our offices, we will collect and process the personal data that you’ve provided.

We may collect the following personal data:

• Basic personal details (your name, email address, postal address, telephone or mobile number and date of birth);
• Financial details (bank account number, UK taxpayer information for gift aid);
• Credit or debit card information;
• IP address;
• Photos, videos or audio recordings used as part of our work with you;
• CCTV which is in use at various NSPCC premises.

We may also collect, store and use the following 'special categories' of sensitive personal data which need more protection, called a 'condition of processing'. We won’t use any of this information without a justified reason:

• Information about your race or ethnicity;
• Philosophical or religious beliefs;
• Sexual orientation;
• Political opinions;
• Trade Union membership;
• Information about your health;
• Information about criminal convictions.

We also collect browsing data when you visit our websites, which may identify your device or web browser. This could be location data, how you found us and the pages you looked at on our website. We use this to provide you with the information that is most relevant to you. 

This data is collected by cookies, which are small files stored on your computers’ or mobile devices’ web browser. These cookies are used to keep you logged in as you move around a site, provide content, and check website performance. This helps us make the website better for you and for others.

To understand how we use your device information, such as IP address (the location of the computer on the internet) and cookies, please see our Cookie Policy page. This page also explains how you can block, control or remove the cookies stored on your web browser using our cookie management tool.

There are many ways that we may use your personal data. Here is how we use your personal data for our main activities:

To provide you with information, services or products you’ve requested, or which may interest you. When you open or click on a link in an email from the NSPCC we will receive information about that action. This helps us understand if our campaigns are doing well, and makes sure that we only contact you in the ways you have agreed. Third parties may send you information on our behalf, but only if you have agreed. For more information, please see “Sharing your information with third parties” below. 

To provide key services for safeguarding children. This could include the collection of ethnicity and health data. We use this to assess the needs of individuals so we work with the right agencies and our services reach the right people.

To enable us to support you in our work with you. Sometimes we use mobile phones, cameras or laptops for filming, voice recording or slideshows as part of our work with you. These are used to improve your relationships, help you understand our work better and help our workers learn how to support you better.

To improve our fundraising activities and the services we provide to children and families. This could be looking at demographics to help our campaign, marketing and service delivery plans. We do this to understand how useful our services are and ensure we spend our money in the best way. If you use an NSPCC service, we use your data as statistics for evaluation but this will not identify you as a person. To make sure we are delivering the best service, the information we have about you may be checked by other members of our organisation.

To check and improve the services offered on our websites. This means we can give you the best user experience, which may involve giving your information to third parties. 

To allow you to take part in interactive features on our website, when you choose to do so.  For example, we may help you auto-complete forms by inserting your contact details for you to edit.

To use your IP addresses to identify relevant information. This may include information such as your approximate location. It also helps us to know information like the number of visits to the website from different countries.

To make our marketing campaigns more relevant to potential donors and customers. 

To record and respond to any compliments, comments or complaints from supporters or service users and to investigate and make necessary changes. All feedback helps us to learn and to improve what we do. For more information, please read our Compliments, Comments and Complaints policy.

To conduct prospect research. For more information, please see the Prospect research section below.

To promote our activities. Where you have agreed we may use photos of you, or testimonials, for marketing.

To match information collected from you through different ways or at different times. That could include information collected online and offline, and from other sources. This includes third parties and publicly available sources. This makes sure that the information we hold about you is up-to-date and accurate. These include third parties such as BT OSIS, Post Office Address File and Experian Quick Address.

To check your suitability for a role at the NSPCC as an employee or a volunteer. This may involve internal searches against our database as part of the application process.

To protect staff and visitors to NSPCC sites. To protect staff, visitors and to protect the organisation against theft, some sites have CCTV installed.

Some of these activities may also involve ‘automated decision-making’. This is where we can make decisions about you automatically without a person being involved, for example the NSPCC uses a chatbot which can direct you to further information automatically depending on the personal data you provide. However, you can object to the use of your information for profiling and automated decision-making. For information on how to do this, please see the section on ‘Your Rights’ below. 

If you wish to change or update your consent for direct marketing you can contact our Supporter Care team. Please see 'Complaints' below.

Our researchers use personal data, including sensitive personal data, in their work. This might include looking at our services such as Speak Out Stay Safe or doing research to help us understand what parents of disabled children need to help keep their children safe from sexual abuse. Research means we can make sure our services, programmes and campaigns support children and families, and identify other areas for research, campaigns and programme development. We don't ask for consent to use your personal data for research but rely on legitimate interests as our lawful basis. For our research activities, we conduct a review to make sure that we consider your rights and freedoms.   

We do prospect research to find people who may be interested in supporting the NSPCC with a large amount of money and to look at people who already support us this way to see if they might be interested in supporting us further. This includes looking at information on current or past supporters, as well as sources in the public domain. We use a scoring system to work out how likely a person is to donate a large amount of money, and the level of support they could provide. This helps us prioritise our resources and tailor funding proposals. We'll offer to work with those currently supporting us or interested in making a major gift to the NSPCC through a relationship management team that offers these individuals personalised opportunities for support, communication, access to events and individual tailored management.

We only use information from reliable sources in the public domain. We never use third parties to do research on our behalf. We do not ask for consent but rely on legitimate interest as our lawful basis. We will tell you if we do conduct research on you as soon as possible. You will be able to see the information we have collected and any score we have given to your record and ask for it to be deleted if you wish. If we can’t tell you within six months, we will delete this information from our records.

Data Protection law means we must have a reason or justification, also known as a ‘lawful basis’, to use any of your personal data:

Consent
This is where we've asked for your permission to use your personal data in a specific way, and you've agreed. For example, to send you marketing via email or SMS.

Contract
We may process your personal data as part of an agreement you have with us. For example, if you work for us or if you buy something from our online shop.

Legal obligation
We may collect or share your personal data when we need to by law. For example, to fulfil a regulatory rule or for fraud detection by carrying out checks on our donors. This might be where we check that a donation has not come from an illegal source.

Vital interests
Where there's an immediate risk to your health we may use your personal data. For example if we're worried about your health or safety at one of our fundraising events.

Public task
Some activities are done in the public interest. For example, collecting personal data about safeguarding concerns raised through the NSPCC Helpline.

Legitimate interests
Our legitimate interest is engaging with the public to further our charitable aims. This means that it’s important for us to talk to members of the public so that we can promote our work and talk about our goals as a charity. We will only use your data in this way if we are sure it is ok to do so, and thought about the effect it would have on you. Some examples of things we do which use ‘legitimate interests’ as a reason are:

• Sending you direct marketing in the post;
• Doing research to understand our supporters and improve the services we offer to families;
• The use of CCTV in some NSPCC offices for monitoring and security reasons;
• Sharing personal data with some teams in the NSPCC so we can communicate with our supporters in the best way;
• Buying marketing lists to promote our professional services via email to people who work with children and young people;
• Handling any compliments or complaints in line with our policy.

We will not rent or sell your personal data to other organisations for use by them in any way, including for their own marketing.

If you decide to do any NSPCC Virtual Training this may be through an online platform such as Zoom. You will then be subject to Zoom’s own Privacy Notice which you will find at https://explore.zoom.us/en/privacy/

We may share your personal data with third parties:

• If we're legally asked to;
• To enforce or apply our terms of use for this website or other agreements;
• To protect the rights, property or safety of the NSPCC, our donors or others.

This includes sharing information with other organisations for fraud detection and protection, or with local authorities or social services who provide health, legal or social care or treatment. We may ask other organisations to look at how well our services work, which might mean sharing some of your information, such as dates of birth, ethnicity, religious beliefs. This is to make sure our services work for people from all different backgrounds. This information will not identify you.

Sometimes we cannot keep information confidential as we need to ensure all children, young people and vulnerable adults are safe. This means that if you tell us anything about yourself or another person being hurt or at risk of being hurt, we might need to tell someone who can help (such as a social worker, parent or teacher). Sometimes the court might order us to share information and you might ask us to share information on your behalf.

If your local authority or another agency, such as your school or the police, have asked us to work with you we will need to share relevant information about you with each other and let them know the outcome of our work. We will tell you who we are sharing your information with and why, unless we are concerned that you or another person are at risk of being hurt, or we do not think it is safe to do so. Sometimes we might want to tell your carer, social worker or someone else about how things are going while you are working with us, but will always check with you first, unless we think it is not safe to do so.

We may ask you to complete a checklist which we send to another organisation so they can provide a report to help us understand what will help you most. We will remove any information that could identify you first.

However, where you have agreed that we can contact you, we may pass on your data to external service providers to contact you on our behalf. For example, we may share your personal information with telemarketing companies such as DTV Optimise or Mango to do campaigns for us.

We may ask external service providers to do tracking and analysis for us as described in the cookies policy. For instance, we may pass on data such as IP addresses to our media agency OMD to check how well our campaigns are doing.

Where we use an external service provider to act on our behalf, we will share only the personal data necessary to deliver the service and will have a contract in place that requires them to meet NSPCC data protection and information security requirements. 

Sharing with Joint Controllers:

The NSPCC uses the Facebook Pixel (cookie) on this website for remarketing, analysis and reporting of NSPCC advertising campaigns as described below in “Remarketing” and in the NSPCC’s Cookies Policy. Use of this tool means that information about pages you have visited on this website and your IP address will be shared with Meta Platforms Inc. (US) who will then serve you advertising on Facebook based on this information.

For the purpose of these “Joint Processing” activities we are required by Meta to provide you with the following information:

Meta Platforms Inc. (US) is a Joint Controller of this Joint Processing. More information can be found in Meta's Privacy Policy at https://www.facebook.com/privacy/policy

The NSPCC uses Meta Products such as the Facebook Pixel, the Facebook ‘Like’ button and Facebook Challenge for our events. These tools help you interact with the NSPCC and also help us understand our supporters. When you interact with these tools your data is shared with Meta as well as the NSPCC because we are ‘Joint Processors’. For more information on how Meta handles your personal data when you use these tools please visit www.facebook.com/legal/terms/businesstools.

More information about how Meta Platforms Inc. (US) processes Personal Data, including the legal basis Meta relies on and the ways you may exercise your rights as a data subject against Meta Platforms Inc. (US), can be found in Meta’s Privacy Policy at https://www.facebook.com/privacy/policy. This means that you can go to their website if, for example, you wanted to see any of your personal data which Facebook is holding.

In addition, please note that:

The NSPCC and Meta Platforms Inc. (US) have:

Entered into A Controller Addendum to determine their respective responsibilities for compliance with the obligations under the UK GDPR with regard to the Joint Processing of the use of Meta Products and the personal information derived from them.

Agreed that the NSPCC are responsible for providing Data Subjects as a minimum with the information required under Article 13 of the UK GDPR and;

Agreed that Meta Platforms Inc. (US) is responsible for enabling your rights as a data subject under Articles 15-20 of the UK GDPR with regard to the Personal Data stored by Meta Platforms Inc. US after the Joint Processing.

This means that Meta Platforms Inc. (US) and the NSPCC have made an agreement together about their responsibilities for anyone who uses Facebook products. They have agreed that the NSPCC must tell people that their information will be shared with Meta, and Meta must make sure that people can use their legal rights when it comes to their personal data, for example if they want to access, or to change, any personal data that Facebook and/or Instagram have. A full list of your rights is in the section called ‘Your Rights’ at the bottom of this page.

We always have your best interests at heart and your personal data will not be kept by the NSPCC for longer than needed.

We're legally required to keep some personal data to meet legal obligations. For example, to claim Gift Aid or for certain financial transactions. We may be asked to keep records for longer periods or be told that legally we must not delete some records.

If you've used any of our services supporting children and families, we will make notes of the work we do. We will keep these notes for 25 or 75 years depending on your circumstances and the kind of work we did with you. For more information, or to request a copy of our data retention policy, please contact our Data Protection team at [email protected].

When you consent to the use of targeting cokies on our website, the NSPCC may pass on your personal data to online advertising tools, including Meta Custom Audiences, Google AdWords Match and Google Analytics for 'remarketing activities'. This means if you've already visited our website we can show you ads on other websites across the internet, including Google and Meta platforms (such as Facebook and Instagram). These websites may use cookies to serve ads based on your past visits to our website. If you do not consent to tailored advertising, you may still receive NSPCC marketing as part of a 'lookalike' audience. See information below on how you can control and manage cookies on your device or web browser.

For some of our advertising campaigns we occasionally use Meta Customer List Custom Audiences. This allows us to display adverts to our existing supporters via Meta platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. Through using this tool we sent Meta your hashed data, this means that it has been replaced with a unique line of code and cannot be unravelled by Meta, but can be used by them to check if you have a registered account on their platforms. If you do have an account and your hashed data is matched, our adverts may then appear on your Meta Platform feed. Meta cannot see this data and will delete it once it is matched. If you do not have an account on a Meta platform, or your hashed email address does not match with an account, then they will also delete the hashed data.

For more information about Meta custom audiences please read their Privacy Policy and Privacy Settings guidance. You can object to your information being shared with Meta; if you wish to object please email [email protected]

Please see the 'Sharing your information with third parties, keeping your information safe' section for further details on data processing of the Meta Pixel.

We want to give you relevant information. To do this, we may need to look at the information we hold on you, or we might look at data sets provided by specialist companies, such as Experian, to help us understand what your characteristics as a supporter might be based on the postcode/area you live in. This analysis includes modelling (e.g. how likely you are to respond to an invitation) and segmenting (looking at people who are similar to you). 

This means we can spend our donations in the best way, to make the biggest impact for children. As our data is taken from different sources (e.g. a donation on our website or campaign data), for data quality purposes we will analyse your data to avoid having different versions of information on the same person on our database.

We sometimes use publicly available information or information taken from specialist companies. These include Royal Mail NCOA, Directory of Social Change and UKChanges; companies that collect and analyse information from public registers to help us keep accurate, up to date information about our supporters. These companies may have got this information directly from you and in circumstances where you expect that they will pass on your information to other organisations.

We will only use data collected in this way for things which you have agreed to, or if not practical, where we think it’s necessary to use your personal data for that reason. We will always ensure that the privacy and security of your personal data is protected.

The NSPCC will ensure that when collecting information such as debit cards, credit cards or personal data that this is done securely. We and our partners use TLS (Transport Level Security) to encrypt data sent between the customer and us or our partners. 

The NSPCC is PCI compliant and uses external Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliant providers to collect this data on our behalf. We do not store PCI data (for example credit card numbers) on our own systems.

When sending us sensitive information, it is safest to use a device with a supported (current) operating system, with regular security updates and virus protection. Only connect your devices to networks that you trust.

Where we have given you (or you have chosen) a password to access certain parts of our website, you are responsible for keeping the password confidential. You agree not to share that password with anyone else.

At the NSPCC we've done everything we can to make sure that your data, whether in paper or electronic form, is treated securely and follows this privacy policy.

The personal data collected from you may, in very rare circumstances, be transferred to, and stored at, a destination outside the UK or European Economic Area ("EEA"). It may also be processed by people outside the UK or EEA who work for us or working on our behalf. This might be, for example, staff processing payment details.

By submitting your personal data, you agree to this transfer, storing and processing at a location outside the UK or European Economic Area. Where data is transferred outside the UK or EEA, we have gone through a full due diligence process (checks) to help ensure the data has the same levels of security. We will make sure the transfer of data outside the UK or EEA is done in a way that follows the law and is consistent with and respects EU and UK laws on data protection. This means that even if your personal data is transferred outside the UK or EEA we will still help ensure it is protected.

Unfortunately, sending information via the Internet is never 100% secure and we cannot guarantee the security of your data sent to our website. This means any such transmission is at your own risk.

To make sure we always have up-to-date information about how to contact you, we may also update your records to make changes to your personal data. 

We may also link the information you provide us with information collected from trusted third parties and partners such as business partners, sub-contractors, advertising networks, analytics providers, search information providers, credit reference agencies as well as publicly available sources. These third parties include, UKChanges, Royal Mail Postcode Address File and Experian Quick Address. An example of would be if you accidentally entered your postcode incorrectly on our system, we would be able to change it to the correct postcode.

Our website uses cookies to distinguish you from other visitors to our website. This helps us to give you a good user experience and improve our site. A cookie is a small digital file that we store on your browser or the hard drive of your computer if you agree. Cookies contain information that is transferred to your computer's hard drive or device.

For more information on cookie files and IP addresses read our cookie policy. This page gives information about how you can prevent or control the cookies that are stored on your computer or device web browser, or remove them completely.

If you'd like to use any of your rights, please contact us using the information below.

a. Right to access your personal data
You have the right to see the personal data that we hold about you in many circumstances, by making a request. This is sometimes termed ‘Subject Access Request’. If we agree that we must provide personal data to you (or someone else on your behalf), we aim to do so within one month from when your identity has been checked. We will not charge a fee for considering and/or complying with the request unless it is considered to be excessive in nature.

We would ask for proof of identity and enough information about your interactions with us so that we can locate your personal data.

b. Right to correct your personal data
If any of the personal data we hold about you is inaccurate or out of date, you may ask us to correct it.
If you would like to exercise your right, please contact us as set out below.

c. Right to stop or limit our processing of your personal data
You have the right to object to us processing your personal data for particular reasons, to have your information deleted if we are keeping it too long or have its processing restricted in some circumstances.
If you would like to exercise this right, please contact us as set out below.

d. Right to stop or limit our processing of your personal data
You have the right to have personal data deleted. This is also known as the ‘right to be forgotten’. The right only applies in certain circumstances.
If you would like to exercise this right, please contact us as set out below.

e. Right to portability
The right to portability gives you the right to receive personal data you have provided to us in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format.
If you would like to exercise this right, please contact us as set out below.

You can make any of the above requests by emailing [email protected] or by writing to:

Data Protection Officer
NSPCC
Weston House
42 Curtain Rd
London
EC2A 3NH

We want to make sure that your personal data is accurate and up to date. You may ask us to correct or remove information you think is inaccurate.

You can also find out more about what to expect if someone has made a report about you and how you can access your information on our report abuse page.

Read our guide to accessing your personal data (PDF, 303KB)

We reserve the right to make changes to this Privacy Policy. Each time you visit this site you should check this Privacy Policy in case any changes have been made to any sections that are important to you. Where appropriate, any changes will be notified to you by email.