CPRE, the countryside charity, works to enhance, promote and protect our towns and countryside including the communities within it. We couldn’t do this without support from people like you, and we are committed to protecting both your data and your privacy. 

We want you to feel assured that any information you give us is held securely and safely, whether you are working for us, supporting us through membership, campaigning, donations, volunteering, fundraising or events.

This policy outlines what data we collect, how we may use it and how we keep your data safe.

This privacy and cookie policy seeks to comprehensively cover the key areas relating to personal data held by CPRE, but in the interests of clarity it is not an exhaustive list of all our policies and practices in these areas.

This policy will change from time to time, as we keep up to date with legislation and regulation and to remain aligned with any relevant changes in our programmes and operations. If material changes are made, we will notify you by placing a prominent notice on the website. You can keep up to date by visiting these pages.

This text was last updated in September 2019.

Getting in touch

You have the right to ask for a copy of the information we hold about you and to have any inaccuracies in your information corrected. You also have the right to ask us to delete any personal information we hold about you. In some cases, we may be unable to delete data, such as if it is required for tax or Gift Aid purposes. In these cases, we will ensure that you are removed from future communications and processing. We are committed to ensuring you receive only those communications you choose.

You can access your personal data held by us or request to receive your information in part or its entirety in machine readable format.

Cookie consent

By using our website, joining or donating to us, you agree that, unless you have set your computer’s browser to reject them, we can place the types of cookies set out below on your device and use that data in accordance with this policy.

For more information about how we use cookies on this site, please review our Cookie Policy below.

Why and how we collect your data

When you give it to us directly

The vast majority of personal data we hold is given to us directly by our campaigners, supporters and volunteers in the course of them interacting with our services, websites or fundraising activities.

When we are working with a third party

We may work with events, such as the Great North Run or London Marathon, or fundraising sites such as Just Giving or Virgin Money Giving. These independent third parties will only share your data with us when you have given permission for CPRE to contact you.

When your information is available publicly

We may combine information that we already have about you with information available publicly or information available from external sources to gain a better understanding of you. This includes the use of profiling and screening techniques to ensure communications are relevant and timely, and to provide an improved experience for our supporters. Profiling also allows us to target our resources effectively, which supporters consistently tell us is a key priority for them. We do this because it allows us to understand the background of the people who support us and helps us to make appropriate requests to supporters who may be able and willing to give more than they already do. Importantly, it enables us to raise more funds, sooner, and more cost-effectively, than we otherwise would.

When building a profile, we may analyse geographic, demographic and other information relating to you in order to better understand your interests and preferences in order to contact you with the most relevant communications. In doing this, we may use additional information from third party sources when it is available. Such information is compiled using publicly available data about you, such as Companies House, the Land Registry website or information that is published in articles and newspapers.

In some situations, we may update our supporters, clients and volunteers’ personal information using partners, for example, to check we have a valid and deliverable postal address, or to check if you are registered with the Telephone Preference Service (TPS) or Fundraising Preference Service (FPS).

Depending on your settings or the privacy policies for social media and messaging services like Facebook or Twitter, you might give us permission to access information from those accounts or services.

You can opt out of your data being used in any of the above-mentioned ways at any time by contacting us.

What data we collect

Personal information is any data that can be used to identify you. It can include, but is not limited to, any of the data listed below.

Data protection law recognises that there are sensitive categories of personal information, such as health information, racial or ethnic origin, or religious beliefs or other beliefs. We would only collect sensitive personal information where there is a clear need to do so such as health information to enable participation in a challenge event. Before we collect any sensitive personal information, we will make it clear what information we are collecting and the purpose we are collecting it for.

Information we collect from you directly or from third parties with whom we work, may include:
• name
• address
• email address
• telephone number
• contact preferences
• bank account details for setting up a regular direct debit
• credit card details for processing credit card payments
• employer details for processing a payroll gift
• taxpayer status for claiming Gift Aid
• National Insurance number
• marital status
• health history
• date of birth, age, and/or gender.

We do not use cookies to collect this type of information.

We may also collect and process information about your interactions with us, including details about our contacts with you through email, SMS, post, on the phone or in person. This might include the date, time, and method of contact, details about donations you make to us, events or activities that you register for or attend or any request for support.

We may also collect and record other relevant information you share with us about yourself, such as your interests or your affiliations with other charities, your local CPRE network group, community or campaign groups, your council or planning team.

Children’s data

We are committed to protecting the privacy of children and young people who volunteer with us, fundraise for us, attend events organised by us or engage on our website. Where necessary we will obtain the consent of a parent or guardian in order to collect and use personal data of children.

If you are a child and would like to get involved with CPRE, please obtain your parent or guardian’s consent before sending any personal information to any website or CPRE. Where we have activities for those under 18 we will ask your age. Please ensure you speak to your parent or guardian before taking part in these activities.

How we use your data

Campaigning for a beautiful, living countryside is something we cannot do without the help of people who share our passion. Raising funds, running campaigns and involving as wide a range of people as we can in our activities is hugely important to us.

We try to offer diverse ways to support and get involved, and use a range of channels to suit supporter preferences, such as our website, postal, email and telephone appeals, and postal and email newsletters and information publications. We may create profiles and database segmentation to ensure communications are relevant and timely and to provide the best possible experience for our supporters. We may also invite supporters to participate in research occasionally. We will always ensure we have your consent before contacting you by email or text for marketing purposes. We may telephone you provided you have given us your permission to do so, with campaign updates, membership renewal requests and occasional appeals. If you have not given us your permission we will not telephone you for these marketing purposes.

The law allows personal data to be legally collected and used by an organisation if it is necessary for a legitimate business interest of the organisation – as long as its use is fair and balanced and does not unduly impact the rights of the individual concerned. We will send relevant marketing by post on the basis that it is within our legitimate interests to do so. If you feel you would like to reduce the amount of post you receive from us or prefer not to receive postal marketing at all, simply contact our supporter care team.

If you are a member of CPRE and request not to receive post, please note that we will continue to post legally required membership documents such as voting papers and AGM notifications, and membership renewal notices but you will not receive information materials such as Countryside Voices magazine or local CPRE updates.

Data sharing within the CPRE network

We will share membership data supplied by you (or collected about you) with other parts of the CPRE network. There are 44 local groups, two of which form part of the National Charity.

The CPRE network is supported by the National Office and together we deliver CPRE’s charitable objectives to protect, promote and enhance the English countryside. 

When you become a member of CPRE, you join both National CPRE and your local CPRE group. The group will be automatically allocated according to your place of residence – or you can specify a preference at any time during your membership. We will share your contact details with your chosen local group so that they can keep you informed of news and events, and invite you to their Annual General Meeting.

Data sharing with third parties

We do not share, sell or swap your information with other organisations for their own marketing purposes. We will share membership data within the CPRE Network as described above. 

There are a number of legitimate situations where we may share your information with third parties whom we have contracted to fulfil specific services for us. This will include organisations such as mail fulfilment houses and email broadcasters who will send out our marketing materials on our behalf. In all of these situations we set up a written contractual agreement that will ensure that those organisations can only use the data provided for the specific purposes we direct them to do, and that they have in place strict security requirements in order to protect your personal information.

We may disclose your personal information if we are requested or required to do so by a regulator or law enforcement or to enforce or apply our rights (including in relation to our website or other applicable terms and conditions) or to protect CPRE, for example in cases of suspected fraud or defamation, or to comply with any other applicable legal obligation.

Where you have agreed to receive email marketing communications from us, we may provide your email address or mobile phone number in an encrypted format to social media companies, such as Facebook or Twitter, or to digital advertising networks that are providing services to us by displaying our advertising to you on those social media platforms and other websites, as well as identifying audiences with interests similar to yours. You can opt out of your data being used to display advertising to you by contacting our data protection lead as described above. However, this will not prevent our advertisements being shown to you on a randomised basis or based on cookie data and may mean that you stop receiving more general marketing communications from us.

Keeping your personal information safe

We take appropriate physical, electronic and managerial measures to ensure that we keep your information secure, accurate and up to date.

Although we use appropriate security measures once we have received your personal information, the transmission of information over the internet is never completely secure. We do our best to protect personal information, but we cannot guarantee the security of information transmitted to our website, so any transmission is at the user’s own risk. However, any payment card details (such as credit or debit cards) we receive on our website are passed securely to our payment processing provider according to the Payment Card Industry Security Standards.

How long we will keep your data

We remove personal data from our systems in line with our data retention policy. The length of time each category of data will be retained will vary on how long we need to process it, the reason it is collected, and in line with any statutory requirements.

After this point the data will either be deleted or rendered anonymous. In certain specific situations, for example where a supporter has kindly pledged a legacy to CPRE in their will, we will maintain their details up to the time when we need to carry out the legacy administration and communicate effectively with their family.

Some of the reasons why we may contact you

To set up or renew your membership
• Process membership subscriptions, donations or other payments
• Set up or alter a direct debit payment
• Notify you of opportunities to get involved in your local area e.g. volunteering opportunities
• Ask you to support one of our campaigns e.g. signing a petition or lobbying your MP
• Ask you to donate to one of our appeals
• Reclaim tax on your donations by claiming Gift Aid
• Send you publications such as Countryside Voices or Fieldwork
• Update you on campaigns through email newsletters
• Invite you to take part in a raffle or other gaming opportunity
• Participate in fundraising events
• Making or changing your will
• For market research
• To notify you of local CPRE activity in your area via your local group newsletter.

Cookie policy

What are cookies?

Cookies are text files containing small amounts of information which are downloaded to your device when you visit a website. Cookies are then sent back to the originating website on each subsequent visit. Cookies are useful because they allow a website to recognise a user’s device and help the owner of the website improve the user’s experience of the site.

You can find more information about cookies at: www.allaboutcookies.org and www.youronlinechoices.eu, for a video about cookies visit www.google.co.uk/policies/technologies/cookies

Does CPRE’s website use cookies?

Yes. If you visit our website, we use cookies to record information about:
• the areas of the website you visit
• the amount of time you spend on the site
• whether you are new to the site, or have visited it before
• the country, region, city and/or borough associated with your IP address or device
• how you came to our website – for example, through an email link or a search engine
• the type of device and browser you use
• how you use the website and the quality of your experience – for example we may track your bandwidth when viewing videos
• how you interact with our donation and sign-up forms – for example what you select as your communication preferences
• any error messages that you receive on the site.

We use cookies to track how visitors come to our site. For example, we use marketing or referring tracking codes in internet addresses (URLs) to show us whether a visitor has come to our site via a link on a referring website or in a specific piece of marketing and to give us insight into the effectiveness of our marketing. Although not through cookies, we do measure the success of the emails we send – so we know what subject lines and stories people liked the most. We don’t share this information.

Some of this information may be used by third party cookies to target you with relevant advertising (see below). However, you can choose to use our website anonymously without giving us any information. Please see ‘Changing your cookie preferences’ below.

Types of cookies

We use ‘first party cookies’. These are cookies served directly from our website to your computer and are often used to recognise your computer when it revisits our site and, in some cases, to remember your preferences as you browse the site.

Cookies may be either ‘session cookies’ or ‘persistent cookies’. Your computer automatically removes session cookies once you close your browser. Persistent cookies will survive on your computer until an expiry date specified in the cookie itself, is reached. Most of our cookies are persistent.

Categories of cookies we use

We have assessed our cookies based on the ICC Cookie Guide. Most of our cookies fall into categories 1 and 3.
1. Strictly necessary cookies: these cookies are essential for the user to move around the website and to use its features.
2. Performance cookies: these cookies collect information about how the user makes use of the site, e.g. which pages the user visits most. These cookies do not collect information that identifies the user.
3. Functionality cookies: these cookies remember choices made by or attributes of the user and enhance the features and content you experience during your visit to our website, such as appeals visited or your location. This cookie is also used to remember a user’s preferences for a font size, or customisable parts of a web page.
4. Targeting or advertising cookies: these cookies collect information about the users’ browsing habits. This may also include your use of social media sites, e.g. Facebook, etc. or how you interact with our website which then shows you relevant content elsewhere on the internet. These may also be used to choose the advertisements that are displayed to you on our website and other websites.

What information does CPRE collect using cookies?

We may collect some, or all, of the information available from cookies when you visit our website, depending on how you use it. We monitor how people use our website, so we can improve it. We collect this information anonymously.

We use a standard type 1 cookie. This contains no personal information, but tells us if that device has visited before. If you log in to our local group area, however, the cookie will be able to identify the user and which user groups they belong to. Note that this data is not stored in the cookie itself. The session data on the website expires and is removed after about 120 minutes of inactivity.

Some pop-ups, such as ‘Get our updates’ use a small type 3 cookie to prevent the pop-up being shown repeatedly once a user has dismissed it, or has already entered their email address. It is not used for tracking. Any pages with tabs or panels may store a small cookie to record the current state of the tab/panel between page requests.

We use session cookies on the pages where you interact with us to give us money, either as a donation or paying membership, or take an e-action, because they allow you to proceed through pages quickly and easily without having to authenticate or reprocess on each page. This means you can link up pages, or use multiple pages, for your actions and donations. However, when you close your browser, the session cookie is lost.

Facebook Pixel is also loaded on every page. The Facebook and Twitter and other social media share buttons don’t themselves generate cookies and are not tracked, but we note the URL of the site you came from to us, as it would be for any link to a third-party site. Pages with embedded Twitter feeds store several cookies for user tracking purposes. Pages with embedded media store a number of small cookies for user tracking and for saving user preferences.

Changing your cookie preferences

The ‘Help’ menu in the toolbar of most web browsers will tell you how to change your browser’s cookie settings, including how to have the browser notify you when you receive a new cookie, and how to disable cookies altogether. Below are links to the most common browsers to help you make any changes:
– Firefox cookie management
– Chrome cookie management
– Safari cookie management
– Internet Explorer cookie management.

Website statistics analytics, testing and personalisation

Google Analytics, a web analytics service provided by Google, Inc. (‘Google’). Google Analytics uses ‘cookies’, which (as discussed above) are text files placed on your computer, to help CPRE analyse how users use the site. The information generated by the cookie about your use of the website (including your IP address) will be transmitted to and stored by Google on servers in the United States. Please read Google’s privacy policy if you are concerned about this.

CPRE has no influence over Google’s activities but do note that Google has signed up to the US Privacy Shield standard for protection of data which has been declared adequate by the EU commission. You can always opt-out of Google Analytics cookies here Google’s opt-out tool. You should be aware that if you follow a link to another website and give any personal information to another company, the uses to which that information may be put will be determined by that third party Privacy Policy, we have no control over that third party.

Complaints

We will acknowledge your complaint within 2 working days and aim to provide a full response within 10 working days. If you are not happy with our response, or you believe that your data protection or privacy rights have been infringed, you can complain to the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) which regulates and enforces data protection law in the UK.

The ICO contact details are:
Information Commissioner’s Office
Wycliffe House
Water Lane
Wilmslow
Cheshire
SK9 5AF