(For details on how to change your mailing preferences, see Section 6)
Who we are and why we want you to journey with us
Project Possible is a UK-based Christian international charity. We currently work in 21 countries with 30 projects and work with them by providing resources, including financial, project skills, evaluation of impact, spiritual guidance, prayer support and encouragement.
We support people in poverty in remote communities through understanding their needs, by providing real solutions and bringing love, hope and dignity. At the end of each project we will be able to demonstrate sustainable transformational impact.
We want our supporters to join us on this journey of faith, and we want to keep them encouraged and informed of the impact their support is having.
At Project Possible we have always sought to be transparent about how we operate with those who support our work through their prayers and giving. We know that you, our supporters, are a key part of God’s plan for Project Possible and we want to honour your commitment to us. Recent legislation affecting how charities operate has led us to restate our Fundraising pledge:
We will:
- Only contact you in the ways you have agreed to;
- Be available to respond with any information you need to see the impact your donation has made;
- Send you our newsletter—by post or email, depending on your request—three to four times a year;
- Send you information on our Lifeline gifts (our alternative gifts scheme), by email if we have your consent to email you;
- Send you information on Emergency Appeals following significant disasters, by email if we have your consent to email you, only if we have a Project Possible partner who is able to respond;
- Send you information about events which we feel might be of interest to you, such as our prayer events and opportunities to meet our Project Possible partners when they are in the UK;
- Ensure that, for any donation you have made where you have asked for the funds to be restricted to a certain project or projects, the entirety of your donation is allocated accordingly.
We have never:
- Contacted you by telephone asking for donations;
- Passed your details to any third party, including other charities, for marketing purposes;
- Pressured anyone to give any money through street fundraising or door-to-door campaigns, And we will continue never to do so.
Project Possible is a fully compliant member of the Fundraising Regulator.
As an independent Christian charity, which has no statutory funding and relies completely on voluntary giving, we value our supporters very deeply.
We do not use funds for TV advertising, so we rely heavily on word of mouth, social media and our supporters’ recommendations to share our work with the wider Christian community. Your good opinion of Project Possible matters to us, and we seek to honour your commitment to us with this pledge.
SECTION 1: Purpose of this document
This Privacy Policy sets out how Project Possible uses and protects any information that you kindly provide us with. We process and store all information in line with the Data Protection Act of 1998 and the EU General Data Protection Regulations as of 25th May 2018. We comply with the guidance supplied by the Fundraising Regulator on Personal Information and Fundraising and its Fundraising pledge: Consent, Purpose and Transparency.
As you interact with us, we will collect your personal information. When you supply us with your personal information we are legally obliged, by the aforementioned Data Protection Regulations, to ensure all information is securely stored and only used for the purpose for which it was requested. However, any payment card details (such as credit or debit cards) we receive on our website are passed securely to our payment processing provider in order to activate the payment, according to the Payment Card Industry Standards.
This Privacy Policy explains how we may collect and use the information that you give us. We reserve the right to amend this privacy statement at any time. By providing us with your personal information, you consent to the collection and use of any information you provide in accordance with this Privacy Policy. If you are under 16, always check with a parent or guardian before giving personal information to anyone.
We treat all our supporters in line with our beliefs and we welcome any feedback on any of our actions—just call us on 01494 4233170 or email [email protected].
SECTION 2: What information do we collect and why?
From you directly
When you contact us directly (including via our website, by phone, email, social media or in person), whether that is by making a donation, submitting a query, requesting information, signing up for an event, etc., we will collect all relevant personal details that you provide in order to fulfil our service to you. Address details are required in order for us to claim Gift Aid, and contact details are required for acknowledging your gift or resolving queries. Of most importance to us is that we can inform you of what has happened to your gift, and we value being able to give you updates on a quarterly basis.
We may ask for details of more personal information (such as marital status, personal interest, etc.) for our own marketing purposes, but only where you choose to provide it and where we have explained why we need it.
From third parties
We collect information from third parties where you have given your information on our behalf, e.g. from fundraising sites such as Give.Net or VirginMoneyGiving, or from charitable giving agencies such as Charities Aid Foundation, Stewardship and Payroll Giving. We only collect the information we require in order to process your donation effectively and legally and to ensure you are acknowledged and any queries can be resolved.
In addition, we collect aggregated or anonymous information about the services you use and how you use them—for example, when you watch a video on our YouTube channel, visit our website, engage with our social media or view and interact with our advertisements and content. None of this data can be identified to an individual and is purely to see the popularity of a campaign. We have a separate Cookie Policy, outlining our use of website cookies.
From publicly available data
We collect information that you make available on, for example, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or similar organisations. You may wish to check their privacy policy to find out more information on how they will process your data. We may collect information from Companies House, Charity Commission and information published in articles, newspapers or blogs.
SECTION 3: DATA USAGE AND STORAGE
What do we use it for?
We will not do anything with your information you would not reasonably expect. Personal data provided by you is used in order to:
- Process your donation legally and effectively, such as claiming Gift Aid;
- Acknowledge your donation;
- Resolve any queries regarding your giving or your contact with us;
- Fulfil our reporting and legal obligations for accounting and tax purposes;
- Fulfil requests from you such as providing information, fulfilling an order for goods or including you in an event;
- Track your correspondence with us so we can provide the best possible service for you and avoid repeated queries;
- Keep you updated about the impact of your giving or support, including providing a quarterly copy of NEWS from Project Possible;
- Inform you of current needs, prayer requests and to ask for support, either financial or non-financial (such as prayer);
- Help us determine from your personal circumstances, interests or geographical location whether a specific campaign, event or information will be of interest or relevance to you; In the case of larger donations, to request further information from you as to how you would like the gift to be used or directed;
- Market research and surveys: We may invite you to participate in surveys or market research to help us improve our website, fundraising, services and strategic development. Participation is always voluntary, by explicit consent only, and no individuals will be identified as a result of market research, unless you consent to us publishing your feedback;
- Profiling and analysis: For the purposes of our legitimate interests, we may occasionally use your personal information to conduct profiling of our supporters or potential supporters. This will help us target communications in a more focused, efficient and cost-effective way, helping us to reduce the chances of supporters and potential supporters receiving inappropriate or irrelevant communications. You can object to such use of your personal information for profiling at any time by contacting us at the details set out at the end of this Privacy Notice.
On what basis do we process your data?
If your first contact with us was on or after the 1st January 2018, we will only contact you based on the consent you have specifically provided.
If your first contact with us was before the 1st January 2018, we may continue to contact you by post but only where we believe you have a legitimate interest in hearing from us. This may include sending you our regular newsletter to keep you updated on our work, sending you reports on projects you have specifically supported, or letting you know about forthcoming events or current appeals.
If we have not had any contact from you in seven years, we will regard that as no longer resembling legitimate interest to hear from us, and we will remove all your personal data that we are not legally required to keep.
Where you have previously asked us not to contact you (either at all or in certain forms), we will continue to respect your preferences. We will only contact you by email for marketing purposes if you have given us your consent to do so.
Please refer to our Fundraising Pledge for further details of our commitments in how we communicate with you.
As a registered charity, we are subject to a number of legal and regulatory obligations and standards. The public naturally expect charities to operate in an ethical manner, and this is integral to developing high levels of trust and demonstrating our integrity. This means that we may carry out appropriate due diligence of donors, check donations and implement robust financial controls to help protect the charity from abuse, fraud and/or money laundering.
Job and volunteering applications
Job and volunteering applications Where you provide personal data and sensitive personal data when applying for a position with us—such as the information on your CV—we will process, store and disclose the personal data we collect to:
- Support the recruitment process;
- Enable you to submit your CV and apply online for jobs;
- Answer any questions you may have;
- Use third parties to provide services such as references, qualifications, criminal referencing, checking services, verification of information you have provided, health screening and psychometric evaluation or skills tests;
- Provide anonymised data to monitor compliance with our equal opportunities policy.
Where you provide personal or sensitive personal data—such as dietary, mobility requirements or health information—to volunteer or travel on a trip with us, we will store, process and disclose the personal information we collect to:
- Deliver the volunteering opportunity, including the disclosure of sensitive data such as medical information, to our partner(s) where necessary to deliver a safe trip or event for all involved;
- Provide information (including fundraising materials) as we promised in the “What we will do” section or equivalent of the volunteer role description;
- Provide the administration of these events or opportunities to serve;
- Monitor the quality of the volunteering opportunity or trip provided;
- Answer any questions or feedback you may have;
- Provide anonymised data to monitor compliance with our equal opportunities policy.
How long do we keep data for?
We will only keep your personal data for as long as is required in order to carry out each activity. In order to fulfil our legal and accounting obligations, we are required to keep your donation details for 7 years from the date of the most recent transaction. Credit and debit card details are never kept or stored—see "Data Sharing" for more information on this.
Our record-keeping of your donation history does not affect your preferences with regard to how we contact you; these will be respected at all times. If you have asked us to end all communication with you and there is no financial history we need to keep, we will delete your details entirely from our systems.
Who has access to it?
Access to personal data is restricted to only those staff members and long-term and vetted volunteers who require it in order to carry out their job role and/or fulfil the service to you. Those restrictions are enforced through our IT system permissions and passwords.
How and where is the data stored?
We ensure that we have in place appropriate technical controls to protect any personal data you provide. For example, we ensure that any online forms are encrypted and our network is protected and routinely monitored.
We use secure, cloud-based systems to store data which are managed externally by Complete IT, our chosen provider who manages our IT, and therefore data is not held outside of the European Economic Area (EEA). We adopt the Information Commissioners approved measures and therefore ensure that personal data is held in compliance with European data protection regulations. All email data is also held within the EU as it is cloud hosted by Microsoft. It is technically held within the UK; however, there is a failover site in Holland which it may use. We take all reasonable steps to ensure that your data is stored and processed securely in accordance with this policy. Complete IT has a fully detailed policy on their approach to the requirements of GDPR. This is available from us should you wish to see it. Complete IT is a Microsoft Triple Gold Partner and is in the top 10 (out of 204) Microsoft SME Managed Partners in the United Kingdom.
GoCardless and PayPal, who provide financial transaction services to a large number of charity websites including ours, have their own privacy policy and manage your data legally in compliance with their policy. For more information, go to www.gocardless.com or www.paypal.com and search for their privacy policy.
By submitting your personal data you agree to this transfer, storing and processing of your information.
SECTION 4: DATA SHARING
Who is data shared with and why?
We use external suppliers for support of our IT systems, who are also bound by General Data Protection Regulations and by contract with us to ensure your information remains secure. We never pass your data to other charities, we never sell data, and we never pass it on to any organisations for external research or marketing purposes.
In the case of donations made by debit or credit card over the telephone, we need to submit the card details provided by you to our bank for processing in order for the donation to be transferred into our account. This submission is carried out directly (during your telephone call) over a secure online banking system. Once submitted, your card details are not stored by us and are no longer accessible to us.
We may need to pass on information if required by law or by a regulatory body. For example, we are required to submit Gift Aid information to HMRC, or we may be asked for other details by a law enforcement agency.
Will we disclose the information we have collected to outside parties?
We may pass your information to our service providers—such as printing and mailing companies—so that these organisations can carry out contracted services on our behalf, such as sending out our supporter magazine. Subject to your communication preferences and our internal policies and procedures, this would include providing your information to third parties that work with us to deliver on our charitable purposes, and other entities that act as fundraisers for Project Possible.
We enter into contracts with all of these service providers that require them to comply with data protection laws and ensure that they have appropriate controls in place to protect the security of your information. We will never sell your details or swap your details with another charity.
SECTION 5: DATA REGARDING CHILDREN AND VULNERABLE PERSONS
Children
We do not collect data from children below the age of 16. If a child wishes to make a donation, any data we require is held on the record of their parent or guardian, and in accordance with the data process outlined in the "Data Collection" and "Data Usage and Storage" sections of this policy.
Vulnerable adults
We understand that additional care may be needed when we collect and process the personal information of vulnerable supporters and volunteers. In recognition of this, we observe good practice guidelines in our interactions with vulnerable people.
SECTION 6: YOUR PREFERENCES AND COMMUNICATING THEM TO US
How to tell us your details have changed or update your preferences
You can contact us anytime to tell us your preferences regarding what you receive from us and how you receive it. You can change your preferences any time by:
- Emailing us at [email protected];
- Calling us on 01494 433170;
- Visiting our website, www.projectpossible.org.uk, and clicking on the "Contact us" link;
- Writing to us at Project Possible, 3 Manor Courtyard, Hughenden Avenue, High Wycombe, HP13 5RE.
We will update your record accordingly within 10 working days.
You have the right to ask us at any time to erase your personal data, remove you from mail lists or ask us to change the way we use your information. You can do so using any of the methods above and we will act accordingly within 10 working days.
How we process your preference changes
We are very grateful when you update your contact details with us as it helps us to ensure we are providing you with the best service, as well as preventing wastage of funds.
When you tell us your updated contact details, personal information or mailing preferences, we make the appropriate changes on our systems within 10 working days. We may use Royal Mail address search to verify and confirm address data in order to eliminate input errors. We may ask you, by email, to verify postal address details if we have reason to believe these have changed, but we still have a legitimate basis to contact you. This is to ensure we use our funds effectively by avoiding wrongly-sent mail and to ensure our Gift Aid records are up to date and verified.
SECTION 7: ACCESSING YOUR INFORMATION
You may request a copy of the personal information relating to you which is kept on file by Project Possible by contacting us at the details below. We will respond within 14 days. Please do keep us updated on any changes in your personal information.
SECTION 8: PRIVACY POLICY UPDATES AND CHANGES
How to make a complaint or raise a concern
If you would like more information, have any questions about this policy or would like to make a formal complaint about our approach to data protection or raise privacy concerns, please contact the Chief Executive:
Email: [email protected]
Phone: 01494 433170
Post: CEO, Project Possible, 3 Manor Courtyard, Hughenden Avenue, High Wycombe, HP13 5RE.
If you have made a complaint to the CEO and are not happy with the response you receive, then you can raise your concern with the relevant statutory body:
Information Commissioner’s Office: Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire, SK9 5AF. Alternatively, you can visit their website.
Our Privacy Notice may change from time to time, so please check this page occasionally to see if we have included any updates or changes and to ensure that you are happy with them. (Last updated: 7th May 2021)