Privacy policy

Animal Aid is a not-for-profit organisation which campaigns peacefully to end all animal abuse and promote cruelty-free living. We are incorporated under the name Animal Abuse Injustice & Defence Society, a company limited by guarantee. Registered in the UK, our company number is 01787309.

When you take action to support Animal Aid (e.g., by making a donation, buying from our shop, signing up to our newsletter or completing a campaign action online), we may keep a record of the details you enter onto our website or in response to any emailed or postal request. This could include your name, address, postcode, and any optional information you have added, such as your title. If you sign up to receive Animal Aid’s e-newsletters, we will keep a record of your name, email address, country and address if you have provided it. The reason we record country is so that we can avoid alerting you to any actions that you won’t be able to take (e.g. government e-petitions can only be signed by people living in the UK and all British citizens). You can stop receiving our emails at any time by clicking the ‘unsubscribe’ link at the bottom of our messages. We also keep a record of donations, subscriptions, raffle ticket sales/purchases and goods orders that you make. If you take part in our online campaigns, we will record which petitions and actions you have signed. This allows us to send emails tailored specifically to you. For example, if you signed a petition in favour of banning animal experiments, we might acknowledge this when we ask you to contact your MP about the same issue. This also helps us to make sure the emails we send out encourage the maximum number of people to take action and help animals.

Reasons for processing your information

Animal Aid uses the information that you provide for us, including your contact and payment details, in order to:

• process any payments you have made
• record these payments and your membership status
• send you postal and email communications
• send you the goods that you have ordered from our shop

We do all these things in order to carry out your wishes, and to enable you to support our work, both actively and financially. We do not use automated decision-making. The legal justification for processing your data and contacting you by post is what the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) calls ‘legitimate interest’. We consider that we have this legitimate interest because you have contacted us, and demonstrated that you are interested in our work. You could therefore reasonably expect us to contact you, and you have not asked us not to do so, and we have no reason for believing that you do not wish us to contact you. All our mailings give you a prominent and straightforward way to opt out of receiving further mailings. We will, of course, stop mailing you, if you ask us to stop. For sending out campaign and fundraising updates by email, our legal justification for processing your data and contacting you is consent. We only send these emails to people who have consented. We will, of course, stop emailing you if you ask us to stop.

Financial details

If you provide us with your card details in order to make a donation or to buy goods from our shop, these will be used in order to process the payment but your card details are never stored on our database. The Animal Aid Shop has a feature to save card details for future transactions. If you choose to use this feature, your card details are not stored on our databases or website, but are held by the payment processor Opayo (formerly Sagepay).

Postal addresses

If you have given us your postal address, we will normally send you one fundraising appeal per year, and you may also receive Outrage magazine four times per year. If you would prefer not to receive any postal mail from us, or if you wish to restrict how much mail you receive from us, you can let us know by visiting animalaid.org.uk/mailings, telephoning 01732 364 546 or emailing info@animalaid.org.uk. The money we raise through postal appeals is vital for allowing us to continue our work to end animal cruelty. We receive no state funding, and rely entirely on the generosity of our supporters. We may write to you to respond to any queries you have raised with us, or to thank you for a donation. We will also use your address to send you any leaflets or other information that you have specifically requested.

Email addresses

If you have signed up to our e-newsletters, we will send you a monthly round-up with news about our campaigns and information about how to support them. We will also send you action alerts (usually no more than one per week) letting you know how you can help with specific campaigns, and other ways you can support our work. Occasionally (around five times per year) we will send you an email asking if you would consider donating to our latest fundraising appeal. All these emails include an unsubscribe option. Even if you have not signed up for e-newsletters, we may also use your email address (if you have provided it to us) to respond to any queries you have raised with us, since this is more cost-effective and environmentally friendly than responding by post.

Telephone numbers

If you have given us your telephone number, we may use this to answer queries you have raised with us. We may also use it to ask you if you have a new address, if a mailing is returned to us saying that you have moved. We may occasionally use it to thank you for a donation. We may also telephone you if we have a query about your goods order, for example if vital information is missing (colour/size etc), to inform you of an unavailable item or if the payment details provided are incomplete (e.g. card expiry date). Your telephone number will never be disclosed to a third party.

Details of past donations

We will use these records to make sure that the correspondence you receive from us is appropriate for you. For example, if you have donated especially generously, we may invite you to special events for major donors. We may also make suggested donation amounts on appeals that reflect your previous donation levels. We will also use these records to determine who might be interested in other types of giving, such as leaving a legacy to Animal Aid. If you would prefer not to be included in this process, you can let us know by telephoning 01732 364 546 or emailing info@animalaid.org.uk.

We never sell or rent your information to other companies or organisations, or arrange to provide our supporters’ details in exchange for theirs. When you are using our secure online donation pages or ordering goods from our secure online shop, your donation is processed by third party payment processors who specialise in the secure online capture and processing of credit/debit card transactions. If you have any questions regarding secure transactions, please contact us. If you have signed an online action (such as a petition or letter), joined our e-newsletter list or made a donation through our website, the details you provided are stored (except for any payment card details) in a secure third-party database provided by Engaging Networks. If you have any questions regarding this, please contact us. If you have signed an online action (such as a petition or letter), the contact details you have filled in will be sent to the recipient. For example, if you have signed a petition asking Cancer Research UK not to support animal experiments, your name will be sent to Cancer Research UK. If you take part in an action to send an email to your MP or any other recipient, the contact details you provide will be included in the email that we send on your behalf.

If you have given us your name and postal address, then this may also be shared with partner organisations who prepare and send our mailings, with whom we have contracts that comply with data protection legislation. Due to the number of recipients, it would be impractical for us to send out every mailing from our office. However, we remain responsible for keeping your data safe and secure, which is something we take extremely seriously. If you ask us, in writing, to transfer any of your personal details to another organisation, we will do so in a format that will be accessible to them. Occasionally, we obtain new data from other organisations. In order to prevent duplicate mailings, we need to ensure that this is not data which we already hold. To achieve this, we may securely share existing data with the other organisation in an encrypted format, to be used for this purpose only and then deleted.

Like many other websites, the Animal Aid website uses cookies and other similar technologies. Cookies are small pieces of text stored on your computer. Some of these are essential to the functioning of the website, while others help us to improve our website by measuring the way it is used. We also use cookies and related technologies to measure the success of our advertisements and target them at people who may be interested in supporting our work.

All users of our website are given an option to accept all cookies, or customise their preferences for each of these categories. Functional cookies cannot be disabled, other than by changing your browser settings.

It is possible to switch off cookies by setting your browser preferences. Visit the help menu on the browser that you use for instructions. You can find out more about cookies by visiting https://www.aboutcookies.org/.

Yes, of course. If you would like to see a copy of the data we hold about you, please just tell us by letter, email or over the phone. We are legally obliged to answer your request within a month, but we will normally do so much sooner than this.

Yes, of course. If you have moved house, or changed your name, title, email address and/or phone number, please let us know by letter, email or over the phone (contact details are above) and we will make the required changes. If you believe there are any other errors in our records, again please contact us.

That’s no problem at all. Please just tell us by letter, email or over the phone (contact details are above) and we will delete your record from our database or we can mark your record as wishing to receive no further communications (this prevents us from adding you back onto our database or mailing lists in future for any reason). We’d be very sorry to see you go though!

Animal Aid’s complaints procedure gives contact details for complaining to Animal Aid. You can also contact the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). You can phone Animal Aid on 01732 364546 ext 435 or phone the ICO on 0303 123 1113