Cookies and privacy policy

World Animal Protection is registered as a Charity in England and Wales (Registered Charity 1081849) and as a Company Limited by Guarantee in England and Wales (Registration No. 4029540). The Company has two subsidiary companies: World Animal Protection Trading Company Limited (Registration No. 2880146) and World Animal Protection Executor Service Limited (Registration No. 3106147). The registered office of all these entities is 5th Floor, 222 Gray’s Inn Road, London WC1X 8HB.

In this policy, whenever you see the words ‘we’, ‘us’ or ‘our’, it refers to both our Charity, the company and the subsidiary companies.

Our International office is in London and we work with World Animal Protection offices around the world. Our offices are linked through collaboration agreements that ensure we work in a unified and consistent way, supporting a strategy developed by staff worldwide.

We use “World Animal Protection Group" in this policy to refer collectively to all global entities (branches, subsidiaries and affiliates). Our branches, subsidiaries and affiliates must operate to World Animal Protection standards but please make sure that you also check the privacy policy of the relevant national office so that you know how they will use your data.

When you donate, sign one of our petitions, ask to receive our email-newsletter, email or write to us with an enquiry, or interact with us in any other way, World Animal Protection may collect personal information about you, such as your:

• name
• email address
• postal address
• home telephone number
• mobile telephone number
• bank account or payment card details

Where it is appropriate we may also ask you for:

• your tax payer status (so that we can claim Gift Aid on your donation)
• your date of birth
• your opinions on charitable giving and animal welfare issues (for example, to help improve and inform our marketing and campaigns, or understanding your motivation to support us)
• information relating to your health or dietary requirements (for example, if you are taking part in a sporting fundraising event)

We may also collect details of your visits to our website*, including:

• location data, web logs
• resources that you access

*For more details, please see our policy on Cookies.

We may obtain information about you from other sources, such as from:

• fundraising sites like Just Giving or Virgin Money Giving
• payroll giving services for charities
• data cleansing services
• Telephone, Mailing, and Fundraising Preference Services
• Royal Mail's National Change of Address Register
• consumer classification services
• other public sources (see Building profiles of supporters below)

We use your information:

• to give you the information, products or services you asked for – such as responding to correspondence you have sent to us, sending you participant information for events you have signed up to
• for internal administrative purposes (such as our accounting and records), and to let you know about changes to our services or policies
• to receive donations, process payments and collect Gift Aid on your donation
• to maintain databases of our volunteers and supporters to keep a record of your relationship with us, including how you prefer to be contacted
• to recruit and manage employees and volunteers
• to provide you with information that we think may be of interest to you (see Direct marketing below)
• to carry out research on the demographics, interests and behaviour of our supporters to help us understand how we can improve our services, products or information. Sometimes this information is used to build profiles (see Building profiles of supporters below)
• to help us understand the ways you might prefer to support us or take part in our activities, we may create a profile of your interests. We’ll do this by comparing your details against publicly available information or social media (see Building profiles of supporters below)
• to identify other similar people like you on social media who we believe would be interested in World Animal Protection, and we may then show them World Animal Protection content (see Facebook and other social media sites below).

Direct marketing includes any communications we send you promoting the aims, ideas and work of World Animal Protection, including: news, campaign updates, fundraising appeals and other ways you can support our work.

We will only contact you by email, telephone and SMS if you have given us your consent to do so for direct marketing purposes.

If you have donated to us, pledged to leave a gift in your Will, or have supported one of our campaigns within the last three years, we may use your postal address (if you supplied it to us) to send you occasional information about our work that we believe may interest you, including our magazine, annual catalogue and vital fundraising appeals to help fight cruelty and suffering.

You can opt out of receiving direct marketing from us at any time. Simply follow the ‘unsubscribe’ links on our emails, call us on +44 (0)20 7239 0500 or email privacy@worldanimalprotection.org.

We use profiling techniques to ensure our communications are relevant and timely. We track the types of animal welfare topics that you respond to, and the frequency and value of your support. When inviting you to make a subsequent donation we may take your previous giving history into account to aid personalisation and help ensure we’re not asking you to donate an amount that is inappropriate. We may use additional information from third party sources, including consumer classification tools that use postal codes to segment the population, to tailor our communications to you better.

We are grateful for all donations we receive, of any amount. In certain circumstances, we may research information about individuals to understand how likely it is that they will be interested in supporting our work and how we can match them with campaigns that align with their interests. In a small number of cases, this includes research to gain a better understanding of potential supporters who may be able and willing to give more than they already do. This enables us to personalise our funding requests and to raise more funds, sooner, and more cost-effectively, than we otherwise would. This “prospect” research is carried out in-house and is compiled using publicly available information, for example, news items that mention other charities an individual has supported, addresses, listed directorships, typical earnings or house prices in a given area. We carry out special assessments, called data protection impact assessments, to ensure prospect research doesn’t undermine the rights of individuals.

We have a legal entitlement to any gifts left in Wills to our charity and are accountable to the Charity Commission under Charity Law to ensure the money is received and used according to their charitable purposes. To fulfil these obligations, we may need to use personal data of living individuals, for example to write a letter to the executor to communicate about the administration of the estate.

Where do we collect personal data from?

• Executors, Trustees, solicitors and any other professional third party instructed in the legacy administration process.
• Third parties, such as the Smee & Ford notification service
• Copies of wills either provided by Executors, Trustees or other professionals acting in the administration, or publicly available online.
• Other co-beneficiary charities that have a similar interest to us under the will
• The public domain

Whose personal data we collect?

• Employees of organisations that we need to communicate with during the administration process including charity legacy officers, solicitor employees, estate agents etc.
• Executors of the estate and Trustees of Will Trusts, who may be family or friends of the donor, or a professional advisor such as a solicitor, accountant or banker.
• Other individuals named as beneficiaries in a will, including those who have a life interest in an ongoing Will Trust.

What data do we collect for gifts in Wills?

• Name and address
• Telephone, email, internet, fax or other electronic communication details were provided to us.
• Co-beneficiaries’ level of entitlement to any gifts or share of an estate in which we receive a benefit.
• We do not collect sensitive personal information such as health status, ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation for example, unless it can be proven to be pertinent to the legacy case and there is a clear reason for doing so.

What lawful basis do we collect this information on?

• Where the data subject has provided their consent
• Where the processing is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation
• Where necessary for the purpose of legitimate interests pursued by the charity in relation to estate administration

How do we use gifts in Wills data?

• We will only use personal information for the purposes of the legacy administration process, the purposes for which it was obtained. For example, where our relationship with an executor or next of kin is solely related to the legacy administration process, we will not use personal data to send marketing (campaigning or fundraising) communications without express consent.
• We only share your information internally where it is directly relevant to those who need to know, when they need to know it.
• We may need to share your information with ‘data processors’ such as associated organisations and agents who provide us with a legacy administration service. These ‘data processors’ will only act under our instruction for use and security of your data.
• We may need to share your information with other charity beneficiaries who have a similar interest to our own in the interest of estate administration only.

How do we store gifts in wills data?

• Personal data is stored on our electronic legacy database with restricted access. Any paperwork containing personal data is kept to a minimum, locked away when not in use and securely destroyed when no longer needed.
• Personal data is held for as long as is necessary to ensure our legal entitlement is administered without challenge. Some legacy administration cases can be ongoing for long periods, for example in a life interest case where we have an interest in an asset that someone else is entitled to live in during their lifetime. There may be some cases where a longer retention period is required, for example where the charity has an ongoing duty to comply with conditions attached to the gift.

Where you have given your consent for us to use your email address or phone number for marketing, we may use this information to match to your account on Facebook or other social media sites to show you World Animal Protection content while you use these services. We keep your data secure by encrypting it and no data we hold about you is retained by the third party.

In addition, we may also use your email address or phone number to link to Facebook or other social media sites to identify other users of these sites who we believe would be interested in World Animal Protection, and we may then show them World Animal Protection content. No data we hold about you is retained by the third party when we do this.

If you would prefer for us not to use your personal data in this way, you can either contact us to opt out of phone or email (call us on +44 (0)20 7239 0500 or email privacy@worldanimalprotection.org) or you can follow these instructions to alter your settings on Facebook.

Please note that this will not guarantee that you never see World Animal Protection content on social media, since the social media site may decide to show you content based on other criteria and without your data having been provided by World Animal Protection.

What is AI: Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines, particularly computer systems, enabling them to learn, reason, and adapt to perform tasks autonomously. Examples of AI include advanced language models, image-generation, data manipulation, recommendations on streaming platforms, route navigation suggestions, and spam filtering.

Why do we use AI: World Animal Protection recognises that AI can contribute to higher levels of productivity and reach in the service of its mission.

How do we use AI: World Animal Protection is committed to ethical business practices. AI systems will never be used to break or circumvent laws or regulations or violate the privacy and rights of people or organisations.

How we ensure your privacy is protected: AI would have been evaluated in a secure environment before approval for wider use for any new way of using AI.

All personal data related activity would be risk assessed and necessary mitigations applied.

World Animal Protection will ensure appropriate lawful basis is applied before we use your personal data for any AI-generated content.

Our use of AI-generated content will be truthful, accurate, and adhere to advertising and fundraising regulations and relevant internal policies.

Copyright: World Animal Protection would ensure all AI-generated content adhere to proper citation and attribution guidelines and shall give credit wherever possible.

We will not sell or swap your information to or with any third party.

Your information, including emails and other correspondence, may be passed internally within the World Animal Protection Group to ensure you are connected with the most appropriate resources. This is usually to connect you with your local World Animal Protection office. This may involve your personal data moving outside the European Economic Area (EEA). When this happens, we ensure that appropriate safeguards are in place to protect your personal information and to keep it secure. If appropriate safeguards do not exist we will only transfer your personal data with your explicit consent, after informing you of the possible risks of such transfer.

We sometimes use trusted third parties to process your information on our behalf because it is more economical to outsource some processing than to do it in house. The kind of work we may ask them to do includes: processing, packaging, mailing and delivering orders, sending postal mail, fundraising by telephone, text or face-to-face, carrying out research or analysis, data cleansing and processing card payments. These third parties are bound by contract requiring them to keep your details safe and secure, and to use your information only to fulfil the service we have specifically asked them to provide. When they no longer need your data to fulfil this service, we ask them to dispose of your details securely, in line with our procedures.

Otherwise, we will only share your information when obliged to disclose it by law, or the disclosure is ‘necessary’ for purposes of national security, taxation and criminal investigation, or if we have your consent.

The length of time that we store your information may vary depending upon the type of information it is, the reasons that we need to use it or other factors, like legal requirements. For example, we are required by law to keep declarations and store all records of Gift Aid transactions for at least six years in case of an audit. We regularly review the personal information that we store, including our paper records, so that we only store it for as long as we need to.

Some of our electronic storage systems are located outside the European Economic Area (EEA). We may transfer your personal information to other offices in the World Animal Protection Group and to other trusted third party organisations as explained in this policy. They may be situated or use computers and storage systems that are located outside the EEA. Where data is transferred or stored outside the EEA, we ensure that safeguards are in place to protect your information.

We have security measures in place to protect against the loss, misuse and alteration of personal data. For example, our employees are only authorised to see and use the personal data they need to see to do their jobs and we use secure server software (SSL) to encrypt financial and personal information you input before it is sent to us. While we cannot ensure or guarantee that loss, misuse or alteration of data will not occur while it is under our control, we use our best efforts to try to prevent this.

Your personal information belongs to you and we want you to feel in control of it. Here’s how you can exercise your rights.

You have the right to request a copy of the information that we hold about you. Please put your request in writing to the Global Data Protection Manager, World Animal Protection, 5th Floor, 222 Gray’s Inn Road, London WC1X 8HB, together with two forms of identification (current passport (the page with your personal details); driving licence; birth certificate; utility bill from last 3 months; current vehicle registration document; bank statement from last 3 months; rent book from last 3 months. We don’t store this identification. It’s used solely to verify the requester’s identity.) It’s helpful if you explain what particular records you’re seeking, but you don’t have to say.

You have a right to ask us to correct data that we hold about you that is inaccurate or incomplete. To do this, please send details of the changes you want us to make via email to privacy@worldanimalprotection.org or call us on +44 (0)20 7239 0500. We may ask you to quote your supporter number or ask for another form of identification.

In certain circumstances you can ask for the data we hold about you to be erased from our records or transferred to another organisation. Where certain conditions apply, you have a right to ask us to restrict the processing of your personal information. You also have the right to object to certain types of processing such as direct marketing (see Direct marketing section above) or automated processing or profiling.

If you would like further information on your rights or wish to exercise them, please write to our Global Data Protection Manager, World Animal Protection, 5th Floor, 222 Gray’s Inn Road, London WC1X 8HB or email privacy@worldanimalprotection.org. If we are unable to fulfil your request, we will provide you with a reason as to why.

If you wish to make a complaint about how your personal data is being processed by World Animal Protection (or any third parties we use to help process your data), or how your complaint has been handled, please see our complaints policy.

You have the right to lodge a complaint directly with the Information Commissioner's Office.

Our website may contain links to other websites that are outside our control and are not covered by this privacy policy. If you access other sites using the links provided, the operators of these sites may collect information from you that will be used by them in accordance with their privacy policy, which may differ from ours.

Any changes we make to this privacy policy will be posted on this page, so please check it regularly. When we make significant changes, we’ll notify you.