Privacy policy

Personal information we collect can include your name, contact details, date of birth, bank account details, credit/debit card details, information about your contact with and support of Sobell House Hospice, and whether you are a UK taxpayer so that we can claim Gift Aid. We may collect personal information about you when you make a donation to us, register for an event, purchase from us, sign up for communications, enquire about our activities, or otherwise give us personal information.

We may gather information about how you use our website, such as which pages are most visited. Wherever possible, this information will be aggregated or anonymised i.e., it will not identify you as an individual visitor to our website.

We do not usually collect sensitive personal information about you unless there is a clear reason for doing so, such as participation in an event where we need this information to ensure we provide appropriate facilities for you. We may collect health information if you tell us about your experiences of the hospice (for example, if you act as a case study for us); however, we will make it clear to you when collecting this information as to what we are collecting and why. We may keep a record of your relationships so we can improve our communication to you, for example details of your spouse if you both support us, so we do not send separate postal mailings to both of you.

We collect information in the following ways:

• When you give it to us directly. You may give us your information in order to sign up for one of our events, tell us your story, make a donation, purchase our products, or communicate with us.
• When you give it to us indirectly. Your information may be shared by independent third parties, or third parties working on our behalf when you support us and with your consent. For example, it may be shared by independent event organisers like the London Marathon, by fundraising sites like JustGiving or Enthuse, by fundraising organisations like Local Hospice Lottery or People’s Fundraising, or by funeral directors collecting in memory donations for Sobell House. You should check their Privacy Policy when you provide your information to understand fully how they will process your data.
• When you give permission to other organisations to share it, or it is available publicly. We may combine information you provide to us with information given to us by other organisations or information that is publicly available from external sources in order to gain a better understanding of our supporters to improve our fundraising methods, products and services, or to ensure that the information we hold on you is correct (for example we may use information from the fundraising preference service to update whether we communicate with you). The information we get from other organisations may depend on your privacy settings, so you should regularly check them.
• When we collect it as you use our website. Like most websites, we use “cookies” to help us make our site – and the way you use it – better. Cookies mean that a website will remember you. They are small text files that sites transfer to your computer (or phone or tablet). They make interacting with a website faster and easier – for example by automatically filling your name and address in text fields. We will give you a choice about whether to accept non-essential cookies. You can read more about our use of cookies below. 

We will only process your personal data if our requirements meet the specified legal basis defined by the GDPR. These include legitimate interest, consent, legal obligation, and contract.

If you make a donation or set up a direct debit on our website, or via one of our printed donation forms, we will process your data under legitimate interest. This data might include bank details, name, and contact details.

If you tick any of the contact preference boxes on our donation forms, or on our website, you are giving consent for us to use your personal data to contact you about fundraising and other information, and also in ways outlined in this privacy notice.

If you agree to Gift Aid a donation you have made, we will use the personal data you have provided under legal obligation to enable us to claim Gift Aid.

We may contact you by post if we feel you may be interested in supporting our work in some way or attending our remembrance events, based on a consideration of a balance of legitimate interest. We ensure you are informed of this at the point at which you provide your data and give you the option to opt out of receiving post.

If you make a purchase from our website or our shops, we may use your personal data under contract to you to complete the purchase or deliver your goods to you.

The full definitions of these specified legal bases can be found here.

We may use your information to:

• Process a donation that you have made
• Claim Gift Aid on your donations
• Process orders that you have submitted and supply goods or services you have purchased
• Carry out our obligations arising from any contracts entered into by you and us
• Deal with entries into a competition
• Seek your views or comments on the services we provide
• Notify you of changes to our services
• Invite you to remembrance events
• Send you communications in relation to your support or enquiry, or in relation to processing a grant, legacy, or job application
• Understand more about our relationship with our supporters and ways in which they could support us further (please see below for more information)
• Administer the website and improve your browsing experience by personalising the website.

If you have given us your consent to do so we may contact you for marketing purposes by mail, email, telephone, mobile telephone, and text. These communications may include information about appeals, events and other fundraising activities, and our shops. We will aim to refresh your consent every 3 years.

We may also send you communications we believe will be of interest to you – for example if you are a new supporter we might get in touch to find out if you would like to receive marketing communications from us in the future, and if we believe you have a connection to the hospice we might send you information about hospice events like our Lights of Love remembrance service, or if you are an organisation who has previously supported us we may contact you to ask you to do so again. Our legal basis for doing this is legitimate interest.

We offer a regular lottery through Local Hospice Lottery, and from time to time we may run Raffles or Lotteries in relation to specific fundraising campaigns. We will use your details to administer the lottery or raffle, and to update you of any prizes you may win.

To comply with our obligations as a charity, we must take reasonable and appropriate steps to know who our donors are, particularly where significant sums are being donated. This means there may be occasions where we conduct research to ensure it would be right for us to accept support, whether that is from an individual or organisation to give assurance that the donation is not from an inappropriate source and to safeguard our reputation. Any information we do collect for this purpose will only consist of what is necessary for us to meet these requirements and will be processed in line with your rights.

We analyse our own supporter database to understand more about the different types of people who donate to and support the charity, including how you have engaged with us previously, demographic information, your professional role and your values and interests. In certain circumstances, and for a limited number of supporters, we will undertake additional research using publicly available data (e.g. LinkedIn, Companies House, Google) to enhance the data you have shared with us directly. This helps us to tailor the information we send to our supporters about our fundraising campaigns, events and activities, so that they are more relevant and appropriate, and aligned with your interests.  Our legal basis for processing your data in this way is legitimate interest. If you want to opt out of these profiling techniques, please send us an email with the subject line: Opt Out Further Research to mail@sobellhouse.org.

We promise to never sell your information to third parties, and when you give us personal information, we always take steps to ensure that it is treated securely.

We have steps in place to ensure that your information is only accessible by appropriately trained staff, volunteers, and contractors, and promise to regularly review this. We may pass your information to our third-party suppliers who are working on our behalf, for example in order to process donations and send you mailings. However, we will only disclose the personal information that is necessary to deliver the service and we have a contract or agreement in place that requires them to keep your information secure and not to use it for their own direct marketing purposes. In addition, we use third party websites who process payments on our behalf, for example Stripe or SumUp. They provide secure payment gateways to receive your payment and pass it on to us. On occasion, we may engage external consultants to help us undertake additional research on a subset of our supporter database, where those supporters have not opted out of their data being subject to profiling techniques.

Some of our suppliers’ operations are based outside of the UK, which means we will store or transfer some or all of your personal data to countries that are not part of the UK or European Economic Area (the “EEA” consists of all EU member states, plus Norway, Iceland, and Liechtenstein). These are known as “third countries” and may not have data protection laws that are as strong as those in the UK and/or the EEA. This means that we will take additional steps in order to ensure that your personal data are treated just as safely and securely as they would be within the UK and under our Data Protection Legislation as follows:

We share your data with external third parties, as detailed in the table above, that are based outside of the UK & EEA. The following safeguards are applied to such transfers:

• We will only transfer your personal data to third countries whose levels of data protection are deemed ‘adequate’ by the Information Commissioner’s Office.
• We use specific contracts with external third parties that are approved by the Information Commissioner’s Office and European Commission for the transfer of personal data to third countries. These contracts require the same levels of personal data protection that would apply under the Data Protection Legislation. More information is available from the Information Commissioner’s Office and the European Commission.
• Where we transfer your data from the UK to a third party based in the US additional steps have been taken to ensure your personal data will be treated as securely and safely as it would be in the UK and under the GDPR. We check whether or not the US-based organisation is certified to the UK extension to the EU-US Data Privacy Framework.  If not, we continue to rely on signed Data Processing Agreements with our data processors based on model contract clauses provided by the Information Commissioner’s Office and European Commission (also known as ‘standard contract clauses’), which impose suitable data protection standards on a contractual basis.

Please contact us using the contact details provided below for further information about the particular data protection mechanisms used when transferring your personal data to a third country.

We may need to disclose your details if required to the police, regulatory bodies, or legal advisors. When you give us personal information, we will take reasonable technical and organisational precautions to prevent the loss, misuse, or alteration of your personal information. We will store all the personal information you provide on our secure (password- and firewall- protected) servers. All electronic transactions you make to or receive from us will be encrypted using SSL technology. No method of transmission over the internet or method of electronic storage is 100% secure, however. Therefore, we cannot guarantee its absolute security.

When using our website, you are responsible for keeping your password and user details confidential. We will never contact you to ask you for your password.

If we hold your personal information, we will only keep it for as long as is required for legal and audit purposes or so that we can keep in touch with you if you have consented for us to do so. When we no longer need to retain your information, we will ensure it is securely disposed of.

To comply with the law, we will keep full details of your donation or support, for example a copy of the donation form you completed, for six years from the end of the financial year in which the donation or support occurred. In addition, if you have told us we can claim Gift Aid on your donations then we will keep details of your Gift Aid pledge for six years from the end of the financial year since we last claimed Gift Aid on a donation you have made to Sobell House.

If you have told us that you plan to leave a legacy to Sobell House we may keep your information indefinitely in order to carry out legacy administration, unless you ask us not to. Otherwise we will delete all personal information we hold about you such as your contact details, how you have supported us and any other information you may have given us, after two years, if you have opted out of hearing from us, or, if you have not opted out, after six years from the end of the financial year when you last supported us or got in touch.

If you give us permission to use your story or a photograph of you, we may use it for up to four years, after which time we will store it in a secure archive facility. We may contact you again to ask for your consent to share your story and/or photograph for another four years. If you would like us to delete your story and/or photograph at any point, please just let us know by getting in touch using the contact details below.

The accuracy of your information is important to us. We aim to ensure that all information we hold about you is accurate and, where necessary, kept up to date. If you change your contact details, or if any of the other information we hold is inaccurate or out of date, please let us know and we will ensure it is updated as soon as possible. You can do this by contacting us at the details below.

You have the right to:

• Request a copy of the information we hold about you.
• Update or amend the information we hold about you if it is wrong.
• Change your communication preferences at any time.
• Ask us to remove your personal information from our records.
• Object to the processing of your information for marketing purposes; or
• Raise a concern or complaint about the way in which your information is being used.

If you wish to find out more about these rights, or obtain a copy of the information we hold about you, please email us at mydata@sobellhospice.org, call us on 01865 857007, or write to us at Sobell House Hospice Charity, Churchill Hospital, Headington, Oxford, OX3 7LE.

If you are aged 16 or under and would like to participate in an event, make a donation or get involved with us, please make sure that you have your parent/guardian’s permission before giving us your personal information.

We recognise the importance of protecting our vulnerable supporters and follow the guidance issued by the Institute of Fundraising on treating donors fairly. We believe this helps to support our staff and fundraisers who come into contact with supporters in providing high quality customer care, ensuring anyone donating to the charity is in a position to make a free and informed decision.

Access the Institute of Fundraising’s website for more guidance.

The Sobell House website contains links to other websites. We are not responsible for the privacy policies or practices of third-party websites.

We keep this Policy under regular review. This Policy was last updated in June 2024.

If you have any questions, please get in touch.

Email: mydata@sobellhospice.org
Phone: 01865 857007
Post: Sobell House Hospice Charity, Churchill Hospital, Headington, Oxford, OX3 7LE