Protecting your privacy is important to us. At all times we aim to respect any personal information you share with us, or that we receive from other organisations, and keep it safe. This Privacy Notice (Notice) explains how we hold and use personal information and your rights and options in relation to it.
If you have any questions about this Notice please contact us using the details in the “Contact us” section below. This Notice contains important information about your personal rights to privacy. Please read it carefully to understand how and why we use your personal information.
This website is operated by The Earthshot Prize (Company Registration No. 13981670 and registered charity number 1198701). As a wholly owned subsidiary, TEP Trading Limited (registered company number 14098707) that carries out commercial activities for The Earthshot Prize, is subject to The Earthshot Prize’s policies and procedures. The Earthshot Prize and TEP Trading Limited are the controllers of the personal information that is collected through the site or otherwise as set out below.
For example, personal information that you give us by filling in forms on our websites or offline, communicating with us by phone, email or letter or filling out a survey.
For example, personal information we receive about you if you use any of the other websites we operate or services we provide. In this case, we will have informed you when we collected that personal information if we intend to share it internally and/or combine it with information collected on our websites, and the purpose for doing so.
Our project partners may share your personal information with us in order to co-ordinate our various project campaigns, for example to invite beneficiaries of these projects to attend events to celebrate their achievements.
Your personal information may also be shared with us by third parties including, for example, our partners; sub-contractors that provide us with technical, payment and delivery services; advertising networks; analytics providers and search information providers. To the extent we have not done so already, we will notify you when we receive personal information about you from them and tell you how and why we intend to use that personal information.
Your personal information may be available to us from external publicly available sources. For example, listed directorships, information from the electoral roll and press reports — we may obtain this personal information, for example, when undertaking due diligence on potential donors or fundraising partners to ensure they align with our mission and values, or when researching prospective donors (see “Donor profiling” below).
When you visit our website, we automatically collect the following personal information:
We may combine your personal information from one or more of these sources for the purposes set out in this Notice.
We may collect, store and use the following kinds of personal information:
Data privacy law identifies certain categories of personal information as sensitive and therefore requiring more protection, for example information about your health or ethnicity. In limited cases, we may collect and/or use your sensitive personal information (also known
as special category data). Normally we will only do so where we have your explicit consent, but there may be other circumstances permitted under data privacy law.
For example, we may record that a person is in a vulnerable circumstance in order to comply with requirements under charity law and fundraising regulation to ensure that we do not send fundraising communications to them.
Your personal information, however provided to us, may be used for the purposes specified in this Notice, including:
The Earthshot Prize engages identification of, and subsequent research into, prospective major donors and influencers — individuals, charitable trusts, companies and volunteers to gain a better understanding of our supporters and identify prospective supporters. We use the following public sources of information to undertake this research including: Companies House (directorships, shareholdings and company accounts) the Charity Commission register, The Electoral Roll (Open Register), the Land Registry, directories (such as The Sunday
Times Rich List, Debretts and Who’s Who), Linked In, Inside Philanthropy, reliable print and broadcast media (including newspapers, magazines and online publications), and information that individuals have put into the public domain such as company websites or professional networking sites. This processing, which may include identifying indicators of wealth, donation history, political affiliations and analysis of our database, will inform our fundraising strategy and help us to provide you with relevant and effective communications. It will also help strengthen the relationship with our supporters in the most efficient way possible. As a charity, this helps The Earthshot Prize make best use of its charitable funds in order to maximise the public benefit it is able to deliver.
You can object to your personal information being used in this way. If you would like to object to The Earthshot Prize undertaking this processing on you, then please contact us.
Like many charities, we need to undertake checks on individuals who give or propose to give large donations to us, so that we are complying with our duties to protect charity funds, assets, and reputation, and to comply with the “know your donor” principles further to Charity Commission guidance, to prevent fraud, and also to ensure compliance with our own ethical policies (Due Diligence Purposes).
We may use third party suppliers to assist us with these checks, and we may obtain information from publicly available sources in order to do so. The Earthshot Prize will follow its Ethical Fundraising and Gift Acceptance Policies in the interpretation and application of due diligence findings. We will periodically review due diligence decisions in line with any
future changes to the charity’s Ethical and Gift Acceptance Policies.
Information that we obtain through carrying out due diligence may be shared with other Royal Charities for Due Diligence Purposes. See “Data Sharing”.
Donor due diligence may also include information which is considered “sensitive personal data”. This may include personal information regarding racial or ethnic origins, political opinions, religious beliefs, health and also information concerning criminal offences.
Please note that we (or our service providers) or third party (including partner) event hosts may film or photograph those attending or taking part in our events.
We may use the footage or photographs for publicity and marketing/ fundraising purposes. For example, in print and/or digital material (including social media) or via external advertising and press outlets, all of which may be made available to the public.
No personal details (e.g. names) of children under 16 will be used in such materials without consent from their parent or legal guardian, but we may use images where children are incidentally pictured (for example, as part of a crowd).
We may use your contact details to provide you with information about our work which we consider may be of interest to you.
We will obtain your consent to contact you via email and text message for these purposes.
See the section “Our legal basis for processing your information” for more information about our use of legitimate interests. We may also contact you by phone on this basis (unless you are registered with the Telephone Preference Service or have opted-out of receiving marketing communications from us).
We send the following marketing materials:
You can opt-out of receiving marketing communications from us at any time using the details in the “contact us” section. Please note that we may still send you administrative communications where necessary.
Depending on your settings or the privacy policies for social media messaging services like Facebook, X (formerly Twitter) and Instagram you may receive targeted advertisements about The Earthshot Prize through our use of social media audience tools.
For example, Facebook’s ‘Custom’ and ‘Lookalike’ Audiences’ programmes enables us to display adverts to our existing supporters when they visit Facebook, or other people who have similar interests or characteristics to our supporters. We may provide your personal information including your email address to Facebook, so it can determine whether you are a registered account holder with them, or so that Facebook create a “lookalike” audience.
Our adverts may then appear when you access Facebook or other social media platforms operated by Facebook/Meta. We only work with social media networks that provide a facility for secure and encrypted upload of data and immediately delete any records not matching with their own user base.
When we work with Facebook to identify you on their platform and provide you with our adverts, we are joint controllers of your personal information with Facebook. We have an agreement with Facebook which sets out our responsibilities to you — for example, we are responsible for informing you about this activity. Both we and Facebook are responsible for keeping your information secure, and you can exercise your privacy rights against each of us individually.
For more information or to manage your social media ad preferences, please see Facebook’s “About Custom Audiences” Guide. and its Data Policy.
Our website also uses web beacons or pixels through third-party service providers that allow us to track conversions and activity on our website as well as generate advertisements that appear on Facebook and other search engines like Google for you and other potential users. Please see our Cookies Notice for more information.
In addition to the campaign communications that you receive from us, we will also communicate with you by post, telephone and e-mail in relation to administrative matters. On occasion, we will also contact you about an event that you have signed up to participate in, for example, to check that fundraising pages have been set up and to provide any other necessary information. We may still need to communicate with you for administrative purposes even where you have opted-out of marketing communications from us.
Unless stated in this Notice, we do not share (unless we have your consent to do so), sell or rent your personal information to third parties for their own marketing purposes.
Due to the nature of The Earthshot Prize, in some circumstances we may share your personal information with the Royal Household or The Royal Foundation — for example to provide information about our event attendees where it is reasonable and lawful for us to do so, and they will share personal information with us.
The Earthshot Prize and The Royal Foundation follow a shared operating protocol which involves a degree of relevant and proportionate ongoing information-sharing between the organisations, carried out in the legitimate interests of both The Earthshot Prize and The Royal Foundation in supporting their individual and collective aims. This is to ensure any approaches to prospective supporters are handled sensitively and proportionately, and to prevent the same supporters receiving multiple approaches at the same time, where they may not reasonably expect this. This personal information may include names, contact details, philanthropic interests and some relevant biographical detail — and where strictly necessary and appropriate to protect the interests of both organisations, see “Donor Due Diligence” above).
Please note that for some campaigns we may use third party moderation companies — where we do this, those companies will be granted access to our social media platforms and will read and review some or all posts made to ensure that the content abides by our community guidelines. Inappropriate content may be removed or hidden, and the individuals who posted may be blocked from further interaction on the channels.
If content is disclosed that suggests that person(s) may be a risk to themselves, a risk to others or disclose information on other potentially at risk persons then we may pass this information to the relevant services to ensure the appropriate action is taken.
We may also disclose your personal information to selected third parties in order to achieve the purposes set out in this Notice, including:
We take proportionate and appropriate measures to safeguard your personal information and to prevent the loss, destruction, misuse or alteration of it.
For example, your personal information is only accessible by appropriately trained staff and contractors, and stored on secure servers. In general, the personal information that we collect from you will be stored at a destination within the UK or European Economic Area (EEA). However, we use agencies and/or suppliers to process personal information on our behalf.
Your personal information may therefore be transferred or stored outside, and/ or otherwise processed by contractors operating, outside, the UK or EEA who work for us or for one of our suppliers.
In these cases we will take all steps reasonably necessary to ensure that the recipient implements appropriate safeguards to protect your personal information (for example, by entering into a contract approved by the ICO and/or European Commission). You are entitled to request a copy of these safeguards.
The transmission of information via the internet is never completely secure, and although we do our best to protect it, we cannot guarantee the security of personal information transmitted via the internet.
The Earthshot Prize must rely on a lawful basis to collect and use your personal information. Data privacy law specifies six such grounds, and we consider the following to be relevant to our use of personal information:
Personal information may be collected and used if it is reasonably necessary to achieve a legitimate interest (as long as that processing is fair, balanced and does not unduly impact your rights).
Where we rely on legitimate interests, depending on the activity, we may be relying on The Earthshot Prize’s legitimate interests.
Those legitimate interests include the following:
Whatever your relationship with us, we will only store your personal information for as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for, including the purposes of satisfying any legal, accounting or reporting requirements.
Usually this will be for a specified amount of time in accordance with our internal retention policy. That length of time may vary depending on the reasons for which we are processing the personal information and whether we have a legal (for example under financial regulations) or contractual obligation to keep it for a certain amount of time.
Subject to the above, generally, we typically retain personal information relating to donors and people who have taken campaign actions or signed up to our mailing lists for 6 years after their last donation or interaction with us and we will then to consider whether to retain for further six years.
Once the retention period has expired, personal information will be confidentially disposed of or permanently deleted.
If you object to further contact from us, we will keep some basic information about you on a “suppression list” in order to avoid sending you unwanted communications in the future.
You have a number of legal rights in relation to our use of your personal information. These rights include:
To exercise any of these rights, please send us a description of the personal information in question, along with an explanation of the rights you wish to exercise, using the contact
details in the “Contact us” section below. In some cases we may ask for proof of identification or further information before we can process your request.
Please note that these rights only apply in limited circumstances. For more information, we suggest that you consult guidance from the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) — or please contact us using the details in the “Contact us” section below if you are unsure.
We keep this Notice under regular review and may update it from time to time, so we recommend that you check it regularly. Where necessary we may also notify you of changes to this Notice by email. This Notice was last updated 15/05/24.
If you have any questions or concerns (including complaints) about this Notice or about the way in which your personal information is being used please let us know by contacting us in the following ways:
In each instance, please ask for or address your communication to Data Protection Lead.
You are entitled to make a complaint at any time to the Information Commissioner’s Office, the UK regulatory authority for data privacy (https://ico.org.uk/global/contact-us/). We are always grateful for the opportunity to resolve your concerns before you approach the ICO, so appreciate if you would contact us in the first instance.
