PRIVACY POLICY INFORMATION

Help for Heroes takes the privacy of its beneficiaries and supporters very seriously and adheres to all aspects of the Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA 18) and the UK General Data Protection Regulations. (UK GDPR)

  • You can visit our website without revealing identifying details such as your name or email address however your IP address will be recorded according to our Cookies Policy.

The personal data that we hold is relative to your relationship with us. It will include personal information if you have voluntarily provided that to us (for instance, a contact method such as home address, phone number and/or email).

By visiting our website, using our services or participating in our activities, you agree to your personal information being collected and used in the manner set out in this Privacy Notice as updated from time to time.

When updated, should there be any material changes and/or changes that could negatively impact you we will make reasonable efforts to notify you in advance and give a reasonable time period for you to object to such changes.

This Privacy Policy (sometimes referred to as a Privacy Notice) explains how and why Help for Heroes collects and processes your personal data.

  • The Help for Heroes group
  • Why we collect your data
  • What personal information is collected
  • Cookies
  • How we use your information
  • What information we disclose to other parties
  • How long we store your data
  • For our beneficiaries, Band of Brothers and Band of Sisters
  • For our Volunteers, Supporters, Donators and Potential Donators and  those who request Volunteer support
  • Facebook, Social Media and news organisations
  • How you are in control
  • Where we store your data
  • Online security
  • Links to other websites
  • Changes to this Policy

Help for Heroes Group is the Data Controller

In this policy, the words ‘We’, ‘Us’, ‘Our’ or ‘H4H’ refer to Help for Heroes ‘the charity’, and Help for Heroes ‘Trading’, ‘Trading Company’ or ‘Shop’.

Help for Heroes is a charity registered in England and Wales (1120920) and Scotland (SC044984).

Help for Heroes Trading Limited is a company registered in England and Wales (registered number: 6380957) at Unit 14 Parkers Close, Downton Business Park, Downton, Wiltshire SP5 3RB.

It is a wholly owned subsidiary which gifts all its profits to Help for Heroes.

Help for Heroes is registered with the Information Commissioners Office (ICO) as a Data Controller.

Our registration number is: ZA089846

Read the Privacy Notice specific to our Trading Company.

Why we collect your data

Under the current information rights law, we are required to have at least one lawful basis to process your personal data dependant on how we collected and processed your information. We use a condition called legitimate interest to process your data and your consent. We process your data in our legitimate interest to provide support to wounded, injured and sick service personnel, veterans and their families.

We determine that in you providing your personal data to us you do so either to support the Charity as a volunteer, to make a financial donation to the charity or to receive support. We will therefore process your data according to the way in which we have received your data as follows:

  • When you submit your personal data to us either via a donation, webform or printed form we will store that data in our database and record any activities that you undertake. We do this to enable us to maintain any preferences you have for receiving information from us and to ensure we suppress your contact when you have requested us to do so.
  • If you undertake events or challenges or volunteer for us, then we will use your personal data to fulfil our legal requirements in administering those relationships.
  • If you donate to us, we will use your personal data to record and provide a receipt for your donation.
  • If you are a beneficiary or seek support from us where we collect data from you in relation to your health, ethnicity, sexual orientation or criminal history we process this with your explicit consent. Where we cannot reasonably be expected to gain consent from you, we will process your data under a legal condition of ‘substantial public interest’ complying with our charitable objectives to provide you support where you are eligible.

What personal information is collected

We collect the following types of Personal Data.

Personal Information such as name, postal address, telephone number, email address, card or bank details, etc. This is taken from the information you voluntarily submit via registration forms, correspondence, phone calls, donations, shopping, Just Giving, Gift Aid declarations, etc.

Special Category Information such as your medical details if you are receiving services from us or undertaking a challenge or event that may require disclosure of medical information for safeguarding purposes. In some cases, we may take some basic criminal history information from individuals accessing our Recovery services for safeguarding purposes only. We will also be collecting data on ethnicity and sexual orientation in order to assist with the promotion of equality and diversity.

Non-personal information such as which web pages you visit, IP addresses, social media used, etc. This is captured using Cookies (see below for more information). Also within this area are any preferences that you may have informed us of, such as how you want to hear from us and which aspects of the charity are of particular interest, etc.

Other information such as information we receive about you if you use any of the other websites we operate or the other services we provide. In this case we will have informed you when we collected that data if we intend to share that data internally and combine it with data collected on this site. We will also have told you for what purpose we will share and combine your data.

We are working closely with third parties (including, for example, business partners, sub-contractors in technical, payment and delivery services, advertising networks, analytics providers, search information providers, credit reference agencies). We will notify you, in advance, where possible when we receive information about you from them and the purposes for which we intend to use that information.

Cookies

We use ‘cookies’ on our website to help us improve its look and feel. A cookie is a small text file which is placed on your hard drive whenever you visit a website. It collects statistics by tracking your movements and can also be used to identify when you return to a website. Where cookies are used, you will be informed of their presence and function and given the opportunity to disallow the cookie being placed on your hard drive. For more information, please read our Cookies Policy. 

We partner with Microsoft Clarity and Microsoft Advertising to capture how you use and interact with our website through behavioural metrics, heatmaps, and session replay to improve and market our products/services. Website usage data is captured using first and third-party cookies and other tracking technologies to determine the popularity of products/services and online activity. Additionally, we use this information for site optimization, fraud/security purposes, and advertising.

For more information about how Microsoft collects and uses your data, visit the Microsoft Privacy Statement.

How we use your information

Help for Heroes will process your data to administer the following items:

  • Help deal with your enquiry, request or application.
  • Process your purchase or a donation.
  • Provide further information about our cause, work, activities or products by post.
  • Seek your ideas and feedback, via research or surveys.
  • Register and administer your event or challenge participation.
  • Use in-house and third-party research companies to analyse who supports us or receives services from us and in what ways. Use the insight to improve our work, services, fundraising activities and communications.
  • Detect and prevent fraud by verifying identities and enabling technical improvements.
  • Provide a more personalised service, such as using your details, interests and behaviours to customise communications we may send you or the web pages you see
  • Provide it to a professional body if required by law or to comply with a legal obligation. To register you with our web site and to administer our web site services for assessment and analysis (e.g., market, customer and product analysis) to enable us to review, develop and improve the services which we offer and to enable us to provide you and other customers with relevant information through our marketing programme.
  • Notify you about changes to our Service.
  • Keep you informed of Trading products (including special offers and discounts which we consider may be of interest to you) from our Shop where you have either purchased something previously or given your consent to be added to our marketing list by email or post.

We will seek further explicit consent from you to process your data for the following:

  • Provide further information about our cause, work, activities or Charity products by email, phone or text.
  • Make decisions about you using computerised technology, for example automatically selecting products or services which we think will interest you from the information we have.
  • Collect special category data such as medical information, ethnicity and sexual orientation which we use to evidence eligibility of Beneficiaries, provide Recovery Services and promote equality and diversity.
  • Where we take photographs of you, we will seek your consent to use them on our website or any published types of media.
  • Where you are a child aged 13 years or under, we will seek the consent of your legal guardian to enable us to add your details to our database.

Targeted direct marketing and data analysis

To ensure we send you information about the Charity that is relevant to you we use simple selections and screening techniques which provides an improved experience for all our supporters.

To select relevant audiences for directing marketing activity we analyse geographic, demographic and other information relating to you in order to better understand your interests and preferences. In doing this, we may use additional information from third party sources when and if it is available.

We will analyse data about our supporters, volunteers and beneficiaries because it allows us to understand the background of the people who support us and seek services from us.

We analyse our supporter base to send different communications to people who might choose to give higher donations. We may use information we already hold on individuals to research their potential to be a significant donor to Help for Heroes and collect additional details that may relate to their employment and any philanthropic activity. We may also estimate their gift/donation capacity based upon their visible assets, history of charitable giving and how connected they are to Help for Heroes. The resulting profile is stored securely on our fundraising database.

We use the analysis to direct appropriate requests to supporters with carefully targeted communications. These analysis activities enable us to raise more money to support our wounded injured and sick returning servicemen and women more cost-effectively. It also reduces the risk of someone receiving information that they may find irrelevant, potentially intrusive or even distressing.

At Help for Heroes, we are committed to putting you in control of your personal data and your free to opt out of this processing activity. To find out more, please use the contact details which you’ll find at the end of this document.

What information we disclose to other parties

We never sell, rent or share your details with other charities or companies for marketing purposes. The only time your information is shared with other organisations is:

  • Where you have given your permission for us to do so.
  • With a small number of trusted partners who are employed as our service providers or agents and are contractually bound to use your information strictly for the performance of a particular service only (e.g., those who securely process payments, deliver goods, host the website, etc.).

These trusted partners are also required to comply with current data protection legislation.

Examples of these partners are Donorfy, Eventbrite, Give Panel, JustGo, SSAFA CMS Ltd, Eclipse (OLM), DotDigital, ARX Survey Systems, Microsoft, Shopify and Facebook.

We may also use the services of trusted partner organisations such as Experian and Factary to help us identify people who may be able to support us with larger gifts/donations using information they may have provided to us as well as publicly available records, such as the electoral role, land records, ‘rich lists’, Who’s Who publications and Companies House records. We only use reputable sources of information, where an individual would have a reasonable expectation that information relating to or about them, may be read by the public. We explicitly avoid any personal data that we reasonably believe has not been lawfully or ethically obtained. We do not use information sources which have not been broadcast or made available to the wider public.

At Help for Heroes, we are committed to putting you in control of your personal data and your free to opt out of this processing activity. To find out more, please use the contact details which you’ll find at the end of this document

  • When we are obliged to do so by law such as sending your information to be checked against the Telephone Preference Service, or if contacted by recognised lawful authorities with a reasonable request for information.
  • Analytics and search engine providers such as Google that assist us in the improvement and optimisation of our site.

How our email marketing works

If you sign up to our email newsletters, we will send them to you with your consent and only until you unsubscribe or ask us to stop sending them.

Currently, our newsletters contain tracking pixels which tell us whether they have been opened, and unique URLs which tell us who has selected the links inside the email. This is the default behaviour of our email provider, and we are unable to make the feature work on an opt-in only basis currently.

We want to share relevant information with you, so this functionality is useful to us but at the moment we can’t disable it for specific recipients.

We use the information about whether you have opened a newsletter, or clicked on the links inside the email, to help us improve the quality and relevance of our communications.

If you don’t want this kind of tracking to be applied to the emails that you receive from us, you can change the settings in your email program to prevent remote images from being loaded and access the content directly from our website rather than following the links.

Links to other websites

Our website may contain information linked to or provided by other companies (such as third-party events, etc). They are outside of our control and not covered by this Privacy Policy. Please be aware that, should you access other sites using the links provided, the operators of these sites may have a privacy notice which differs from our own.

We can’t accept any responsibility or liability for such privacy policies. Please check the relevant policies before you submit any personal data to these websites.

Volunteers

Where you contact us to either request the assistance of Help for Heroes volunteers or to provide your services as a Help for Heroes volunteer, we will process your personal data (name, home address, email address and phone numbers) in order to provide this service. If you decide to include any special category as part of this process, you should understand that you are providing us with your consent to hold and further process that data.

The Media, Social Media and The Help for Heroes Website

As part of our fundraising activities and your potential interaction on social media sites, we have activated enhanced data sharing with Facebook. This involves the sharing of name, email, phone number, browsing behaviour and address with Facebook. We do not share any special category data with Facebook. If you have any questions about this, please do get in touch.

Complex changes have taken place in respect of the Privacy Shield with the United States where Facebook store their data. However, they are implementing standard contractual clauses to ensure that your data is kept secure to the standards identified in the Data Protection Act 2018.

We may occasionally share your personal data on our YouTube channel the Help for Heroes website and other social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter along with national news organisations.

When and if this occurs, we will discuss this with you and we will clearly explain why we wish to tell your story and potentially use images, video footage and audio recordings where you are identifiable by attaching/linking your name to the published article.

We will always seek your consent for the use of your personal data, and we will keep a record of how you provide that consent, be it in writing or provided verbally.

We will on occasions record what occurs at events, gatherings and functions using video and still photography and you may attend one of these events along with other individuals. When this occurs, it would be impractical and difficult to seek the clear consent of each attendee or passer-by. Where the images/videos recorded are of a crowd and do not focus on one individual or a group of individuals, it is unlikely to be personal data as the individuals will not be identifiable. Data protection law, in these circumstances, will not therefore apply.

If you have any concerns about this, please do get in touch using the contact details at the end of this document.

FOR OUR BENEFICIARIES

We never sell your details to other charities or third parties.

Where we collect data concerning your health, ethnicity, sexual orientation and criminal history from you to evidence your eligibility and enable the delivery or Recovery Services, we will do so only with your explicit consent. Where we cannot be reasonably expected to gain your consent, we will process your medical data under the current legislation using a condition of ‘substantial public interest’.

Where we collect information in relation to criminal history, we do so only to fulfil our safeguarding responsibilities for the provision of Health and Social care and will limit access to staff in our Welfare and Psychological wellbeing services along with our Risk and Compliance team.

If you access our Psychological Wellbeing, Veterans Clinical Liaison Service including Veterans Injury Clinic or Occupational Therapy service we will collect and create health-related data which will form a health record for the purpose of providing these services to you.

Where you agree to complete surveys or questionnaires relating to the recovery services we provide to you, we will retain this data in a secure database with access to limited staff for a period of 10 years.

We share fully anonymised, unidentifiable data with other organisations for research purposes with the aim of developing an understanding of beneficiaries needs across the sector.

We may occasionally need to share your information with our partner charities and organisations to deliver the service and support you may need. We will NEVER do this unless you have given your consent for us to do so.

How you are in control

We will send you information about Help for Heroes according to any preferences you submitted by phone, post, email or electronic messaging services. You can alter your preferences through your existing portal registration account. Alternatively, contact our Supporter Care Team by mailing contact@helpforheroes.org.uk, or by calling 0300 303 9888, Monday-Friday, 9am-5pm.

Please note, if you ask us not to contact you for marketing purposes, we will retain your details on our suppression list to ensure we do not accidentally contact you in the future.

We will usually inform you (before collecting your data) if we intend to use your data for such purposes or if we intend to disclose your information to any third party for such purposes.

The Information Commissioners Office (ICO) are the independent regulators of the UK General Data Protection Regulations (UK GDPR) and the link below provides advice and guidance about your personal data rights and the potential next steps you can take.

https://ico.org.uk/your-data-matters/

The ICO also provide advice by telephone and the helpline can be contacted on 0303 123 1113.

If (after reading the guidance) you wish to exercise any of your information rights, you can contact us using the details below:

By writing to our Data Protection Officer, Help for Heroes, Unit 14 Parkers Close, Downton Business Centre, Wiltshire SP5 3RB.

By email to dpo@helpforheroes.org.uk

To speak to us please call our supporter care team on 0300 303 9888.

Whilst we will endeavour to adhere to your wishes, we may not be able to delete your personal data if there is a legal obligation for us to retain it. This includes where financial data must be retained for seven years or where data must be retained to enable us to defend our legal position.

We will always inform you of the basis of any such decision not to delete your data as appropriate.

We may on occasions be required to request proof of identity to be able to fulfil your request.

How long we will keep your information for

If you support our charity by donating, undertaking a challenge, organising an event, volunteering, signing up to our marketing list, or purchasing a product from our shop, we will keep your data in our active database up to ten years after your last activity.

This is so that, if you re-connect with us, we will have a history of how you have supported the Charity in the past. After this time, your data is deleted.

If you receive support from us, we will keep your data in our secure case management database for 10 years.

If you want us to stop processing your data, you can contact us and request that we carry out your request. (See the section entitled ‘How you are in control’).

Where we store your data

We make every effort to securely store all personal data. All Help for Heroes personal data is kept within the EU and our storage of it adheres to our obligations to you under UK GDPR.

As part of our business process, we may transfer some data to reputable companies outside the European Economic Area. We take steps to ensure that your information will be afforded the same level of protection as that required of us under applicable UK data protection legislation.

All information you provide to us is stored on our secure servers. Any payment transactions will be encrypted using SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) technology.

Where we have given you (or where you have chosen) a password which enables you to access certain parts of our site, you are responsible for keeping this password confidential.

Online security

No transmission via the internet is wholly secure, so we urge you to safeguard your personal data by protecting your computer with anti-virus software to ensure your personal data is being transmitted securely. Any information you choose to send to us is carried out at your own risk.

Our IT team is working hard to ensure system resilience at Help for Heroes, and we also ensure that that any third-party data processors we utilise are compliant with the security provisions of the Data Protection Act 2018.

We do not retain credit card or banking details on our web servers. Instead, we transfer them to a secure banking database for the purpose of collecting and recording payments. We also encrypt payment pages using SSL.

Once we have received your information, we will use strict procedures and security features to try to prevent unauthorised access.

Changes to this policy

Help for Heroes will from time-to-time update and modify its website and/or this Privacy & Security Policy.

This update was carried out in April 2023.

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