Privacy Policy

At Shelter Cymru, we’re committed to protecting and respecting your privacy.

Shelter Cymru helps tens of thousands of people in Wales every year who are struggling with bad housing or homelessness through our advice, support and legal services. We fundraise to make sure we have enough resource to be there when people need us and we campaign to make sure that one day, no one will have to turn to us for help.

When doing this, we process personal data about people who receive advice, guidance or housing support services from us – or provide us with support through donations, campaigns, booking on courses or volunteering/ working with us. We are committed to protecting your privacy and take this responsibility very seriously. We therefore take care to safeguard it.

This Policy explains when and why we collect personal information about people, how we use it, the conditions under which we may disclose it to others and how we keep it secure. This Policy was prepared to be as comprehensive as possible, but it does not include an exhaustive list of every aspect our collection and use of personal information. However, we would be happy to provide any further information or explanation about our practices.

We may change this Policy from time to time so please check this page occasionally to ensure that you’re happy with any changes.

Any questions regarding this Policy and our privacy practices should be sent by email to our Data Protection Officer ([email protected]) or in writing to our Head Office:

Data Protection Officer
Shelter Cymru
25 Walter Road
Swansea
SA1 5NN

Alternatively, you can telephone our Head Office on 01792 469400.

Who are we?

We’re Shelter Cymru; Wales’ people and homes charity dedicated to helping those living in poor housing or facing homelessness. Shelter Cymru is a registered charity (no. 515902) and a registered company (no. 01830262). The registered address is Welsh Housing Aid Ltd T/A Shelter Cymru, 25 Walter Road, Swansea SA1 5NN. Shelter Cymru is an independent Welsh charity and is not part of Shelter England or Shelter Scotland.

How do we collect information from you?

We obtain information about you when you use our services, when you contact us with an enquiry, when you make a donation, if you register to receive information from us/ sign up to a particular service or if you apply for a job with us (including volunteering positions).

What type of information is collected from you?

The personal information we collect might include your name, address and other general contact details. If you are a service user, we may need to record information about your circumstance in order to give you the support you need.  If you make a donation online or purchase a product from us, 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.

How is your information used?

We may use your information to:

• process a donation that you have made;
• process orders that you have submitted;
• to carry out our obligations arising from any contracts entered into by you and us (including service provision);
• dealing with entries into a competition;
• seek your views or comments on the services we provide;
• notify you of changes to our services;
• send you communications which you have requested and that may be of interest to you. These may include information about campaigns, appeals, other fundraising activities, updates on our work and general information about our charity;
• process a job/ volunteer application.

We review our retention periods for personal information on a regular basis. We are legally required to hold some types of information to fulfil our statutory obligations (for example the collection of Gift Aid). 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.

Who has access to your information?

We will never sell or rent your information to third parties. Similarly, we will not share your information with third parties for marketing purposes.

Third Party Service Providers working on our behalf: We may pass your information to third party service providers 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 mailings). 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. Please be reassured that we will not release your information to third parties for them to use for their own purposes unless 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 you are using our secure online donation pages, your donation is processed by a third party payment processor, who specialises in the secure online capture and processing of credit/debit card transactions. If you have any questions regarding secure transactions, please contact us.

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 service users. However, we will take steps with the aim of ensuring that your privacy rights continue to be protected.

Your choices

You have a choice about whether or not you wish to receive information from us. If you do not want to receive direct marketing communications from us about the vital work we do in ending homelessness in Wales, then you can select your preferences by ticking the relevant boxes situated on the form on which we collect your information.

We will not contact you for marketing purposes by email, phone or text message unless you have given your prior consent. We will not contact you for marketing purposes by post if you have indicated that you do not wish to be contacted. You can change your marketing preferences at any time by contacting us: [email protected] or 01792 469400.

How you can access and update your information

The accuracy of your information is important to us. We’re working on ways to make it easier for you to review and correct the information that we hold about you. In the meantime, if you change email address, or any of the other information we hold is inaccurate or out of date, please email us at: [email protected], or write to us at:

Data Protection Officer
Shelter Cymru
25 Walter Road
Swansea
SA1 5NN

Alternatively, you can telephone our Head Office on 01792 469400.

You have the right to ask for a copy of the information Shelter Cymru holds about you.

Security precautions in place to protect the loss, misuse or alteration of your information

When you give us personal information, we take steps to ensure that it’s treated securely. Any sensitive information you give us via our website (such as credit or debit card details) is encrypted and protected. When you are on a secure donation page, a lock icon will appear on the bottom of web browsers such as Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Non-sensitive details (your email address etc) you give us via our website are transmitted normally over the Internet, which 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, be it written, online or over the phone, we make our best effort to ensure its security on our systems.

Profiling

We may analyse your personal information to create a profile of your interests and preferences so that we can contact you with information we believe might be relevant or of interest to you on the grounds of ‘legitimate interest’.

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 committed to protecting 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.

Review of this Policy

We keep this Policy under regular review. This Policy was last updated in May 2018.

A cookie is a small data file that is downloaded from a website to your computer, to make the site easier to use in a number of ways: it may store details that you submit on the site, such as your personal settings, your location, or what you have in a shopping cart etc, so you don’t need to enter information more than once.

Using cookies does not allow us to identify users personally
The Shelter Cymru website uses a small number of cookies to give us a better overall picture of how people interact with the site, and how we can improve our services to our clients and supporters.

Below are details of the cookies we use, and their purpose.

Website analysis
Shelter Cymru uses Google Analyticsto track how people use the site, so we can gain a better understanding of our visitors’ needs and identify areas where we can make improvements. The information we gather through this process is completely anonymous, and visitors to the site cannot be identified. The following cookies set for this purpose are:

_utma
_utmb
_utmc
_utmv
_utmz
is.returning

Storing information during your visit
At certain points when you’re on the Shelter Cymru website you may submit information that you want the site to remember during your visit. For example, when you add something to your shopping cart, then continue to browse on other pages; or when you input your email address and this is passed through to another page.

Cookies set for this purpose are these:

cookiesAccepted
sq-active-remote-session
sq_system_session
backToLocation

Sharing tools and social media site cookies
We have used sharing tools on this site to enable you to share information and actions with others on your social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. When you do this, the site will set a cookie. Shelter does not control this functionality, and you should check the site of the relevant third party for information on their cookie policy.

Controlling and deleting cookies on your computer
All browsers allow you to manage which cookies you accept, reject and delete. You can usually find these controls under the ‘Preferences’ or ‘Tools’ menu. You can find more detail about individual browser settings at http://www.aboutcookies.org.

If you choose not to accept cookies from the Shelter Cymru website, some sections will not work properly (eg Advice by email).

Some of the information on our website relates to sensitive issues. If you would like to remove details of the pages you have viewed on our site from your computer, you can clear your browsing history. To do this, choose ‘tools’ from the top navigation bar on your browser, select ‘internet options’, and click on ‘clear history’. Alternatively, refer to the instructions for your browser in the ‘help’ menu.

Personal information you submit on the Shelter Cymru website is stored on secure servers. Occasionally, in order to complete your request as outlined above, we may need to transfer personal information you submit to us to countries or jurisdictions outside the EEA which do not provide the same level of data protection. In such instances, we will ensure that a contract is put in place to make sure your details are protected. We will never sell or share your personal information with any other organisation besides Shelter Cymru.

The Shelter Cymru website contains links to external sites not owned or managed by us. We cannot be held responsible for the content or for the privacy of any external sites.

If your personal details change, please help keep our records up to date by contacting 08000 495 495, or use this contact form.

You have the right to ask for a copy of the information we hold about you under the Data Protection Act 1998. To request a copy, please contact us on 08000 495 495, or use this contact form.