Animal Welfare Investigations Project Limited and AWIP International Ltd (collectively referred to as “AWIP” or “Animal Welfare Investigations Project”) are committed to protecting and respecting your privacy.
This Policy explains when and why we collect personal information about people who visit our website, how we use it, the conditions under which we may disclose it to others and how we keep it secure.
We may change this Policy periodically in accordance with Data Protection legislation so please check this page occasionally to ensure that you’re happy with any changes. By using our website, you’re agreeing to be bound by this Policy.
Any questions regarding this Policy and our privacy practices should be sent by email to info@awip.org.uk or by writing to Animal Welfare Investigations Project, Redwood House, Brotherswood Court, Almondsbury, Bristol, United Kingdom, BS32 4QW.
WHO ARE WE?
Animal Welfare Investigations Project Limited (Company no. 13760374) and AWIP International Ltd (Company no. 15522405), collectively referred to as “AWIP” or “Animal Welfare Investigations Project,” are dedicated to protecting animal welfare. The legal entities are listed below:
- Animal Welfare Investigations Project Limited is a limited company with its registered address at Redwood House, Brotherswood Court, Almondsbury, Bristol, United Kingdom, BS32 4QW.
- AWIP International Ltd is a limited company by guarantee with its registered address at 71-75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London, United Kingdom, WC2H 9JQ.
This privacy policy applies to Animal Welfare Investigations Project Limited and AWIP International Ltd. Both entities are registered as data controllers with the Information Commissioner for the United Kingdom and are collectively referred to as “AWIP” or “Animal Welfare Investigations Project” in this document.
HOW DO WE COLLECT INFORMATION FROM YOU?
Animal Welfare Investigations Project collects personal information about you in several ways:
When you support us by:
- Signing one of our petitions
- Making a donation to AWIP
- Engaging with our social media and digital advertising
- Joining our volunteer and activist communities
Additionally:
- When you apply for a job at AWIP
- When you visit our website
- When you contact our Supporter Care team
To comply with UK data protection rules, AWIP will always ensure we have legal justification for collecting and using your personal information.
The legal basis that we rely on will depend on the circumstances in which we collect and use your personal information. In almost all cases, our processing of your personal information will fall into one of the following categories:
- Where you have provided your consent to allow us to use your data in a certain way.
- Where it is necessary for us to process your data in order to comply with a legal obligation.
- Where it is in our legitimate interests to contact you in order to raise funds and achieve our campaign objectives. Where we rely on a legitimate interest to use your information, we will always ensure that this is done in a way that is not intrusive or distressing and respects your rights.
- Where it is necessary for us to process your data in order to carry out the performance of a contract with you.
WHAT TYPE OF INFORMATION IS COLLECTED FROM YOU?
Cookies
Like many other websites, the AWIP website uses cookies. ‘Cookies’ are small pieces of information sent by an organisation to your computer and stored on your hard drive to allow that website to recognise you when you visit. They collect statistical data about your browsing actions and patterns and do not identify you as an individual. For example, we use cookies to store your country preference. This helps us to improve our website and deliver a better more personalised service.
It is possible to switch off cookies by setting your browser preferences, but turning cookies off may result in a loss of functionality when using our website.
If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year.
If you have an account and you log in to this site, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.
When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.
If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.
Embedded content from other websites
Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.
These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracing your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.
HOW IS YOUR INFORMATION USED?
We may use your information to:
- Process a donation that you have made;
- To carry out our obligations arising from any contracts entered into by you and us;
- Seek your views or comments on the services we provide;
- Notify you of changes to our services;
- Send you communications via email or post after you sign up to our mailing list. These may include information about campaigns, appeals, petitions and other fundraising activities;
- Process a job application which you make to us.
We review our retention periods for personal information on a regular basis. We will hold your personal information on our systems for as long as is necessary for the relevant activity, or as long as is set out in any relevant contract you hold with us.
Animal Welfare Investigations Project Limited and AWIP International Ltd share your Personal Information to effectively carry out our activities and operations.
Animal Welfare Investigations Project may share your Personal Information with its sister organisation Friends of AWIP International, which is a fiscally sponsored project of Fiscal Sponsorship Allies (EIN: 85-0839183). By agreeing to these Terms and Conditions, you expressly consent to the sharing of your Personal Information in this manner.
Animal Welfare Investigations Project transfers Personal Information across borders, mainly between the United Kingdom and the United States of America. You accordingly expressly consent to the cross-border transfer of information in accordance with the terms of this Privacy Policy and for the purposes set out herein.
SHARING YOUR INFORMATION
Unless other stated within this Privacy Policy, we will not release your information to any third parties unless you have specifically agreed that we can do so or where we are required to do so by law, for example, by a court order or for the purposes of prevention of fraud or other crime.
When we are involved in successful prosecutions, either directly or indirectly, we may release the identity of the convicted defendant in press statements. Additionally, we may notify local and national journalists about pending court proceedings. We do this to advance our objectives in investigating animal cruelty, to raise public awareness of animal cruelty, and to deter future offences.
If you provide us with information regarding animal cruelty, we may need to share this information with enforcement agencies such as Trading Standards, the Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA), the police, Social Services, or other animal welfare organisations including, but not limited to, the RSPCA, RSPB, or the League Against Cruel Sports. We will only share your personal information when necessary to prevent or detect crime.
We do not share your information with third parties for marketing purposes.
Third Party Service Providers working on our behalf:
Your information is passed on to our third party service providers, agents subcontractors and other associated organisations for the purposes of completing tasks and providing services to you on our behalf (for example to process donations and send you emails).
However, when we use third party service providers, we disclose only the personal information that is necessary to deliver the service and we have a contract in place that requires them to keep your information secure and not to use it for their own direct marketing purposes.
Third Party Product Providers we work in association with:
If you make a donation online, your card information is not held by us, it is collected by our third party payment processors, who specialise in the secure online capture and processing of credit/debit card transactions, as explained below.
Donations are handled by PayPal, GoCardless or Stripe (depending on how you choose to donate). These are secure payment providers, equipped to protect payments and personal data. Their privacy policies are published on their websites.
If you have any questions regarding secure transactions, please contact us at info@awip.org.uk.
When you give us personal information, we take steps to ensure that it’s treated securely. Any sensitive information (such as credit or debit card details) is encrypted and protected.
Non-sensitive details (your email address etc.) are transmitted normally over the internet, and this can never be guaranteed to be 100% secure. As a result, while we strive to protect your personal information, we cannot guarantee the security of any information you transmit to us, and you do so at your own risk. Once we receive your information, we make our best effort to ensure its security on our systems.
We use MailerLite as our marketing automation platform so we can send you emails about the campaign. When you sign up to join our mailing list, you acknowledge that the information you provide will be transferred to MailerLite for processing in accordance with their Privacy Policy and Terms.
We may transfer your personal information to a third party if we’re under a duty to disclose or share your personal data in order to comply with any legal obligation or to enforce or apply our terms of use or to protect the rights, property or safety of our supporters and customers. However, we will take steps with the aim of ensuring that your privacy rights continue to be protected.
Occasionally other providers are used on a similar basis.
YOUR CHOICES
You have a choice about whether or not you wish to receive information from us. You can unsubscribe from mailings at any time or email info@awip.org.uk to be removed from our mailing list.
When signing a petition, declaration or writing to politician, if you leave your email address, telephone number, or postal address you agree that we may use these to contact you.
You can change your marketing preferences at any time by contacting us by email: info@awip.org.uk.
HOW YOU CAN ACCESS AND UPDATE YOUR INFORMATION
The accuracy of your information is important to us. If you change email address, or any of the other information we hold is inaccurate or out of date, please email: info@awip.org.uk or write to us at: Animal Welfare Investigations Project, Redwood House, Brotherswood Court, Almondsbury, Bristol, United Kingdom, BS32 4QW.
You also have the right to ask for a copy of the information you have provided to us. Please contact us if you wish to be sent this data.
If you have an account on this site, or have left comments, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you.
You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.
PROFILING
We may analyse the personal information you give to us when you sign up to our mailing list to create a profile that may include your Parliamentary constituency, local MP and preferences so that we can contact you about specific appeals or campaigns. We may make use of additional information about you when it is available from external sources to help us do this effectively. We may also use your personal information to detect and reduce fraud and credit risk.
As a fundraising organisation, we undertake in-house research and from time to time engage specialist agencies such as Prospecting for Gold to gather information about you from publicly available sources, for example, Companies House, the Electoral Register, company websites, ‘rich lists’, social networks such as LinkedIn, political and property registers and news archives.
We may also carry out wealth screening to fast track the research using our trusted third party partners. You will always have the right to opt out of this processing. We may also carry out research using publicly available information to identify individuals who may have an affinity to our cause but with whom we are not already in touch. This may include people connected to our current major supporters, directors or other lead volunteers. We also use publicly available sources to carry out due diligence on donors in line with the Gift Acceptance Policy and to meet money laundering regulations.
This research helps us to understand more about you as an individual so we can focus conversations we have with you about fundraising and volunteering in the most effective way, and ensure that we provide you with an experience as a donor or potential donor which is appropriate for you. We shall be relying on legitimate interest to conduct this research.
We may also use your name and contact details to check against sources, such as Royal Mail’s National Change of Address and the BT Operator Services Information System (OSIS) file, to ensure we have the most up to date contact details for you. We may store relevant information about you that you voluntarily share with us.
If you would prefer us not to use your data in this way, you can contact us at info@awip.org.uk.
LINKS TO OTHER WEBSITES
Our website may contain links to other websites run by other organisations. This privacy policy applies only to our website‚ so we encourage you to read the privacy statements on the other websites you visit. We cannot be responsible for the privacy policies and practices of other sites even if you access them using links from our website.
In addition, if you linked to our website from a third party site, we cannot be responsible for the privacy policies and practices of the owners and operators of that third party site and recommend that you check the policy of that third party site.
16 OR UNDER
We are concerned to protect the privacy of children aged 16 or under. If you are aged 16 or under‚ please get your parent/guardian’s permission beforehand whenever you provide us with personal information.
TRANSFERRING YOUR INFORMATION OUTSIDE OF EUROPE
As part of the services offered to you through this website, the information which you provide to us may be transferred to countries outside the European Union (“EU”). By way of example, this may happen if any of our servers are from time to time located in a country outside of the EU. These countries may not have similar data protection laws to the UK. By submitting your personal data, you’re agreeing to this transfer, storing or processing. If we transfer your information outside of the EU in this way, we will take steps to ensure that appropriate security measures are taken with the aim of ensuring that your privacy rights continue to be protected as outlined in this Policy.
If you use our services while you are outside the EU, your information may be transferred outside the EU in order to provide you with those services.
HOW WE USE YOUR DATA FOR OUR INVESTIGATIONS
To support our company objectives and in line with our Legitimate Interests, we collect and process certain information about individuals from various sources. We maintain a range of data concerning individuals (referred to as data subjects), known as ‘personal data.’
In exceptional cases, the information gathered during our investigations and intelligence collection may include sensitive data, such as details on a data subject’s racial or ethnic origin, religious beliefs, political opinions, health, or sexual orientation. This “Special Category Personal Data” or “Sensitive Personal Data” is managed in accordance with GDPR regulations.
We maintain an intelligence database and case management database to support the prevention or detection of crime, or the apprehension or prosecution of offenders. Data shared with us in relation to these purposes may be included in this database.
Personal data collected through our investigations and intelligence process will be reviewed after six years. Depending on its continued relevance, it will either be deleted or retained for an additional five years.
You have the right to access your data under GDPR. However, we may refuse to release information if we believe that doing so would prejudice the prevention or detection of crime or the apprehension or prosecution of offenders.
REVIEW OF THIS POLICY
We keep this Policy under regular review.
COMPLAINTS
If you feel that we have not properly responded to a request you have made to us regarding our use of your personal data, or that we have not handled your data correctly, you have the right to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioner’s Office.
You can contact them by calling 0303 123 1113, or by going online to www.ico.org.uk/concerns.