Privacy Policy

Equality Now relies on the support of our global networks to build a just world for women and girls. It is important to us that everyone who supports us feels confident and comfortable with how any personal information shared with us will be looked after or used.

This Privacy Statement sets out how we collect, use and store your personal information (this means any information that identifies or could identify you).

The Equality Now Privacy Policy may change so please remember to check back from time to time, this version 3.0 was last updated on 12 November 2021. Where we have made any changes to this Privacy Policy, we will make this clear on our website or contact you about any changes.

• • 1. Who we are

    Equality Now is committed to protecting your personal information and making every effort to ensure that your personal information is processed in a fair, open, and transparent manner.

    We are a “data controller” for the purposes of the Data Protection Act 1998 and the EU General Data Protection Regulation 2016/679 (“Data Protection Law”).  This means that we are responsible for, and control the processing of, your personal information.

    For further information about our privacy practices, please contact us at supporters@equalitynow.org

    2. How we collect information about you

    Everything we do, we do to create a just world for women and girls. We want to make sure you receive the communications that are most relevant to you, be it through visiting our website or receiving emails, post, or phone calls. We want to make sure you have a good experience with us when you take an action to support our work, make a donation, book an event, or fundraise for us in any way. We also want to make sure that you are kept up to date with progress on the actions that you have supported and we can let you know about other actions we think you would be interested in supporting.

    We collect information from you in the following ways:

    • • When you interact with us directly:

        • • This could be if you take an action on our website, sign up to our email lists, make a donation, purchase Equality Now merchandise, attend our events, apply for a job or volunteering opportunity, or otherwise provide us with your personal information. This includes when you phone us, visit our website, or get in touch through the post, or in person.

    • • When you interact with us through third parties:

        • • This could be if you provide a donation through a third party such as Beacon, Stripe, or GoCardless (our UK payment providers) or Blackbaud Merchant Services (our US Payment Processor), or one of the other third parties that we work with and provide your consent for your personal information to be shared with us.

    • • When you visit our website:

        • • We gather general information which might include which pages you visit most often and which information is of most interest to you. We may also track which pages you visit when you click on links in emails from us. We also use “cookies” to help our site run effectively. There are more details below – see ‘Cookies’.
        • • We use this information to personalize the way our website is presented when you visit to make improvements and to ensure we provide the best service and experience for you. Wherever possible we use anonymous information which does not identify individual visitors to our website.

    • • From other information that is available to the public:

        • • In order to tailor our communications with you to your background and interests we may collect information about you from publicly available sources such as your public social media profiles or through third-party subscription services or service providers (we have provided further details about this below – see ‘Profiling: Making our work unique to you’).

    3. Information we collect and why we use it

    Personal Information

    Personal information we collect may include details such as your name, date of birth, email address, postal address, telephone number, credit/debit card details (if you are making a purchase or donation), your occupation, and your language and communication preferences as well as information you provide in any communications between us.  You will have given us this information whilst taking an action on our website, signing up to our email lists, making a donation, purchasing Equality Now merchandise, attending our events, applying for a job or volunteering opportunity, or any of the other ways to interact with us.

    Equality Now honors all requests for anonymity and confidentiality. Otherwise, donors who contribute more than $1,000 (or equivalent) per year are publicly acknowledged in Equality Now’s Annual Report.

    We will mainly use this information:

    • • To process your donations or other payments, claim Gift Aid on your donations (if you are a UK resident) and verify any financial transactions.
    • • To provide the services or goods that you have requested.
    • • To update you with important administrative messages about your donation, an event or services, or goods you have requested.
    • • To comply with the Charities (Protection and Social Investment) Act 2016 and follow the recommendations of the official regulator of charities, the Charity Commission, which requires us to identify and verify the identity of supporters who make major gifts so we can assess any risks associated with accepting their donations.
    • • To keep a record of your relationship with us.
    • • Where you volunteer with us, to administer the volunteering arrangement.

     If you do not provide this information, we will not be able to process your donation, sign you up for a particular event, or provide the goods and services you have requested.

    We may also use your personal information:

    • • To update you on the progress of the actions that you have supported.

    • • To contact you about our work and how you can support Equality Now around the world(see section 8 on ‘Marketing’ below for further information).
    • • To invite you to participate in surveys or research.

    Occasionally members and donors will request that we send information about Equality Now or merchandise to their friends or colleagues, and they provide Equality Now with the contact information for these individuals. The information collected for these purposes includes:

    • • Name
    • • Address
    • • Email address
    • • Phone Number

    We will not use these details for any other purpose.

    4. Profiling: making our work more unique to you

    We want to improve how we talk to you and the information we provide through our website, services, products, and information. To do this we sometimes use profiling and screening methods so that we can better understand our supporters, your preferences, and needs to provide a better experience for you.

    Depending on your settings and the privacy policies for social media and messaging services like Facebook and Twitter, you might give us permission to access information from those accounts or services. For example, we occasionally participate in Facebook’s “Custom Audience” program which enables us to display adverts to our existing or potential supporters via Facebook. We provide personal information such as your email address to Facebook to enable them to determine if you are a registered account holder with Facebook. Our adverts may then appear when you access Facebook and on your Facebook feed. Your data is sent in an encrypted format that is deleted by Facebook if it does not match with a Facebook account. For more information please read the Facebook Business page about Custom Audiences and Facebook’s Data Policy.

    We may carry out targeted fundraising activities using profiling techniques based on the information that we hold about you. We may also work with third-party organizations who provide additional insight, this may include providing wealth screening information or general information about you that is publicly available.

    This information can be appended to the information that you have provided which allows us to use our resources more effectively by better understanding the background of our supporters and making appropriate requests based on what may interest them and their capacity to give.

    You can of course opt-out of this activity at any time. To do this, email supporters@equalitynow.org’ with the subject line ‘Please stop the analysis of my data’

    5. Legal basis for using your information

    In some cases, we will only use your personal information where we have your consent or because we need to use it in order to fulfill a contract with you (for example, because you have placed an order on our website).

    However, other lawful reasons allow us to process your personal information, and one of those is called ‘legitimate interest’. This means that the reason that we are processing information is that there is a legitimate interest for Equality Now to process your information to help us to achieve our vision of a just world for women and girls.

    Whenever we process your Personal Information under the ‘legitimate interest’ lawful basis we make sure that we take into account your rights and interests and will not process your personal information if we feel that there is an imbalance.

    Some examples of where we have a legitimate interest to process your Personal information are where we contact you about our work via post, use your personal information for data analytics, conduct research to better understand who our supporters are, for our legal purposes (for example, dealing with complaints and claims), or for complying with guidance from the Charity Commission.

    6. Marketing

    We will only contact you about our work and how you can support Equality Now by phone, email, or text message if you have agreed for us to contact you in this manner.

    However, if you have provided us with your postal address we may send you information about our work and how you can support Equality Now by mail unless you have told us that you would prefer not to hear from us in that way.

    You can update your choices or stop us from sending you these communications at any time by contacting ‘supporters@equalitynow.org’ or clicking the manage my preferences link at the bottom of the relevant communication.

    7. Sharing your Information

    The personal information we collect about you will mainly be used by our staff (and volunteers) at Equality Now so that they can support you.

    We will never sell or share your personal information with organizations so that they can contact you for any marketing activities. Nor do we sell any information about your web browsing activity.

    Equality Now may however share your information with our trusted partners and suppliers who work with us on or on our behalf to deliver our services, but processing of this information is always carried out under our instruction. We make sure that they store the data securely, delete it when they no longer need it and never use it for any other purposes. Some examples of where we may share your information are with our fulfillment partners who help to create and send information to you to reduce our costs, with our partners who help us to process donations and claim Gift Aid, and our partners who help us to manage our social media accounts.

    We enter into contracts with these service providers that require them to comply with Data Protection Laws and ensure that they have appropriate controls in place to secure your information.

    Legal disclosure

    We may disclose your information if required to do so by law (for example, to comply with applicable laws, regulations, and codes of practice or in response to a valid request from a competent authority); or, in order to enforce our conditions of sale and other agreements.

    8.   Keeping your information safe

    We take looking after your information very seriously. We’ve implemented appropriate physical, technical, and organizational measures to protect the personal information we have under our control, both on and off-line, from improper access, use, alteration, destruction, and loss.

    Unfortunately, the transmission of information using the internet is not completely secure. Although we do our best to protect your personal information sent to us this way, we cannot guarantee the security of data transmitted to our site.

    Our websites may contain links to other sites. While we try to link only to sites that share our high standards and respect for privacy, we are not responsible for the content or the privacy practices employed by other sites. Please be aware that Web sites that have links on our site may collect personally identifiable information about you. This privacy statement does not cover the information practices of those websites or advertisers.

    Any debit or credit card details which we receive on our website are passed securely to Stripe or Blackbaud Merchant Services, our payment processing partners, according to the Payment Card Industry Security Standards.  These third parties securely process Credit Card information and Equality Now is not privy to intimate credit card details.

    9.   How long we hold your information for

    We only keep it as long as is reasonable and necessary for the relevant activity, which may be to fulfill statutory obligations (for example, the collection of Gift Aid).

    10. Your rights

    You have various rights in respect of the personal information we hold about you – these are set out in more detail below.

    If you wish to exercise any of these rights or make a complaint, you can do so by contacting us at supporters@equalitynow.org

    If you are in the UK, you can also make a complaint to the data protection supervisory authority, the Information Commissioner’s Office, https://ico.org.uk/:

    • • Access to your personal information: You have the right to request access to a copy of the personal information that we hold about you, along with information on what personal information we use, why we use it, who we share it with, how long we keep it for and whether it has been used for any automated decision making. You can make a request for access free of charge.  Please make all requests for access in writing, and provide us with evidence of your identity.
    • • Right to object: You can object to our processing of your personal information where we are relying on a legitimate interest (or those of a third party) and there is something about your particular situation which makes you want to object to processing on this ground. You also have the right to object where we are processing your personal information for direct marketing purposes.  Please contact us at supporters@equalitynow.org, providing details of your objection.
    • • Consent: If you have given us your consent to use personal information (for example, for marketing), you can withdraw your consent at any time.
    • • Rectification: You can ask us to change or complete any inaccurate or incomplete personal information held about you.
    • • Erasure: You can ask us to delete your personal information where it is no longer necessary for us to use it, you have withdrawn consent, or where we have no lawful basis for keeping it.
    • • Portability: You can ask us to provide you or a third party with some of the personal information that we hold about you in a structured, commonly used, electronic form, so it can be easily transferred.
    • • Restriction: You can ask us to restrict the personal information we use about you where you have asked for it to be erased or where you have objected to our use of it.
    • • No automated-decision making:  Automated decision-making takes place when an electronic system uses personal information to decide without human intervention.  You have the right not to be subject to automated decisions that will create legal effects or have a similar significant impact on you unless you have given us your consent, it is necessary for a contract between you and us or is otherwise permitted by law.  You also have certain rights to challenge decisions made about you.  We do not currently carry out any automated decision-making.

    Please note, some of these rights only apply in certain circumstances and we may not be able to fulfill every request.

    11.   Cookies

    ‘Cookie‘ is a name for a small file, usually of letters and numbers, which is downloaded onto your device, like your computer, mobile phone, or tablet when you visit a website.

    They let websites recognize your device so that the sites can work more effectively, and also gather information about how you use the site. A cookie, by itself, can’t be used to identify you.

    How do we use cookies?

    We use cookies to distinguish you from other users of our website. This helps us to provide you with a good experience when you come to our website and also allows us to improve the user experience.

    The cookies we use

    We use the categorization set out by the International Chamber of Commerce in their UK Cookie Guide.

    We use all four categories of cookies:

    • • Strictly necessary cookies are essential for you to move around our website and to use its features, like our shopping basket and your account.
    • • Performance cookies collect anonymous information about how you use our site, like which pages are visited most.
    • • Functionality cookies collect anonymous information that remember choices you make to improve your experience, like your text size or location. They may also be used to provide services you have asked for such as watching a video or commenting on a blog.
    • • Targeting or advertising cookies collect information about your browsing habits in order to make advertising relevant to you and your interests. As such if you visit the Equality Now website you may then be more likely to see adverts about Equality Now’s work on other websites as your browsing suggests that this is an area of interest.

    No cookies, please

    You can opt-out of all our cookies (except the strictly necessary ones). Find out how to control and delete cookies in your browser.

    But, if you choose to refuse all cookies, our website may not function for you as we would like it to.

    If you have any questions about how we use cookies, please contact us at supporters@equalitynow.org

    12.   Monitoring

    Your communications with our teams (including by telephone or email) may be monitored and/or recorded for training, quality control, and compliance purposes to ensure that we continuously improve our customer service standards.

    To find out more about this policy and how we look after your personal information, contact us by emailing supporters@equalitynow.org